Back when I did embedded development full-time I always lusted after QNX, but the costs and royalties were higher than what our low-volume product could justify. Or maybe we were just cheapskates.

No, you are right, in volume QNX is expensive. We spent a ton of money ($1600 / license iirc) on licenses for a system that we built, and even so it felt like Quantum never took us serious because we only needed 10's of them rather than the 100's of thousands they were used to selling to their bigger automotive customers. But it is still an OS that will for me always embody the 'road not taken' and I still strongly believe that it was a better road, based on my experience with IRIX, Windows, DOS, VMS, Linux, VAX Unix, OS/9, Plan 9 and QNX. It felt like that only one that always ran and that always stayed responsive, no matter what we threw at it. Across many years and 10's of machines running various versions of QNX I have not seen a single production crash of the OS that was not an indication that the underlying hardware had died. But it was perfectly possible to anticipate even that and have an Erlang like supervisor system in place to deal with that.