It is fair to say Lucid has been incompetent with Android Auto. Three years of promises of AA is a joke at this point. I am another SUV buyer who decided not to buy the Gravity because of this issue.
It's frustrating that it's not there. Whether or not it's a big deal comes down to the individual car owner. It's completely understandable why it might cost them sales. Personally, I can wait. But I had an early reservation and didn't buy the Air until a bit over a year ago, when they finally had enough of other promised features that I needed. I didn't need a new car in the interim so it didn't cost them a sale. But it easily could have.
The lack of certain features did cost them a Gravity sale for my family, and the missing feature was the availability of the vehicle itself. It all comes down to timing. Lucid had a choice. They could have waited for AA to be available and held off on selling the vehicles. They could have sold them and said they had no idea when AA would be available. Or they could have sold them and said when they reasonably believed it would be available. They went with the latter. They turned out to be wrong. That's on them.
With other features, they went with the middle ground. For example, I know that they are going to deliver more features with Dream Drive Pro, but they wouldn't tell me what or when. I didn't buy it until it had enough of the features that they had explicitly promised. The lack of a road map cost them sales, but it would have been worse had they promised more specific major features that didn't show up when promised.
I also have what is literally one of the first Teslas with Autopilot. I ordered the car before the feature was announced. They could have held off on the hardware until they had the software working. Had they done that, I would have needed to have traded the car in if I wanted certain features. The delayed software frustrated people, but getting hardware on a car without the software that uses it was a net positive for me in the long run. I ended up with a better car over time for no extra cost. However, with FSD, they did promise things, but not deliver until almost a decade later. That was an extreme screw up, and they did know better.
Some approaches are terrible, some are bad in hindsight but might have seemed right at the time, and all can be positive or negative depending on the buyer. If the native software had a few more features that I want, I might not care about AA at all. It did enough at the time I bought it that not having AA was workable, and knowing that I'll have it later is a plus.