I should work at a loss or for free forever? Western devs with PhDs in high cost jurisdictions aren't going to be RFP cost competitive with devs in India and Eastern Europe.
We built for quality not cost effectiveness. The proposal on the table is to have people with no knowledge about specialized software development, research, and formal methods dunning Kruger their way to "competitive bids". It will result in us being priced out.
My two options are to leave and repurpose the engineers to high growth work. Or to let them go and setup dev centers in the developing world. I like my employees and don't want to lay them off. So we'd stop development and move on.
You know nothing about how much this costs, which is entire point. It's a vanity and popularity contest. Not real engineering or science.