Amen! That story mirrors my own experience. Neither approach is absolutely better or worse, they are each inherently better at solving different types of problems. Some realtime problems are just silly to try to handle abstracted away from the source of the events. But ROS, should not have a problem treating a low level integrated robot as a module by way of introduction to the “ROS way”.
What ROS lacks is a simple clear path (development, tutorial, community outreach) to go from individual low level integrated sumo bots, RC, Arduino firmata, Vex, FIRST, etc to a useful ROS dev environment that handles swarm communication, coordination, and configuration based modular code update on Arduino devices in the field that are not running ROS.