Hey there @msadowski, thanks for opening a thread! I’m a ROS nut, but also one of the snapcraft maintainers, so I hope that I can answer your questions.
This was true in the past, but less so today. Please see this write-up. I’ll admit it’s still not the easiest thing, but I know of a few companies using it.
Yeah, it’s a bit like packaging your ROS system as debs just in order to test on the robot: no one really does that either. Put any sort of packaging step in the development iteration loop and things slow down pretty quickly. Snaps are currently very much a deployment/update tool (get a prototype working outside of snaps, then productize it using snaps). We’re actually working on making iteration a lot better this cycle, and you’ll see some improvements already in the next release, but we’re not there yet. It will still never be as easy as just running from source, though.