Boston Dynamics is a black hole for funding.
No, that's what it costs to play in this game. There are theoretical problems to be solved, for which solutions may not be known. There are also many practical problems to be solved in mechanical design, actuation, and electronics. Those will yield to money and routine engineering effort.
That was the lesson of the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2003-2005. Until then, the typical robotics project was a professor and three to five grad students, and it took years to make minor advances. DARPA had been putting money into automatic driving since the 1960s without getting anything useful out. Dr. Tony Tether, the DARPA director at the time, decided that academic robotics needed a major kick in the ass. The DARPA Grand Challenge did that.
It wasn't the $1M prize which caused major universities to devote big chunks of their CS departments to that project. It was the threat that if they didn't do well, their DARPA funding would be cut off for failure. Fear worked as a motivator.
A side effect of the 2003-2005 Grand Challenge was that many key components, like integrated INS/GPS combos and LIDAR systems, became smaller, cheaper, and better, now that there was some demand. The original CMU INS/GPS combo took 9U of rack space and required air conditioning. Three years later, you could get that in a box the size of a thick book.