I think this would be helped a lot if the maker community immersed itself more in industrial engineering.

Like you mentioned, its hard to go from "hah, I can make a cool thing" to "Let me make this super useful mechatronic contraption" but this is the bread and butter of industry.

You see production lines and they're just a long string of such contraptions working in unison.

Makers nowadays have amazing resources that were previously reserved only for industry so heck yeah, maybe go make a fish fillet machine or something just for kicks but also maybe a brand new small business