I'm probably going to lose some karma for this...
I, too, could come with a half-dozen answers that would be "far superior" to what 100+ years of the finest minds in the industry could come up with. But in reality, I really, seriously doubt that my designs would hold up because there's a *reason* that things are done the way they are.
And, yet, some guy named Elon Musk - who never worked at Ford, GM, Honda, the guy's a nobody - is the one who's making all the money in electric cars right now. Why?
Now and then industries that have been around for 100 years get so stuck in doing things the same way and simply scaling it can't get over the hump where you have to say "we can't scale this way of doing it, we have to start from scratch". They also have a huge patent catalog related to their current way of doing things, a huge number of engineers who know this method inside out, etc. There's considerable inertia to overcome, and few companies overcome it.
That's why when things change it's often the newcomers who do it.
Here's another one - Vizio. Ever heard of them 15 years ago? They never made a CRT-based television. The founders came from a monitor manufacturer and decided to start making TVs based on LCD technology. They went straight to Sam's and Costco to sell them. They pretty much own that market now.
Meanwhile, where's Westinghouse? Or RCA? They turned out a ton of tubes back in the day, but they're gone. Nobody wants a freaking X-ray generator in their house now.
Honestly, I think a shakeup like this is long overdue in the elevator business. You say there are so many moving parts to your caterpillar drive - do you have any idea of how many moving parts are in a standard elevator. Your idea cuts the moving parts down to perhaps 1/10th of what there is now. Getting rid of counterweights is a huge deal. You can even keep the counterweight and change the traction to your idea and there are still far fewer moving parts.
Elevators were first made when a tall building was 10 stories. The idea that a radical overhaul in design isn't needed for buildings that are 20 times that tall is laughable.
So, yes, I think you're absolutely wrong. An outsider is almost certainly what is needed to scale elevators up like this.