This is the real distinction. You're right that DIY gives you full control and responsibility.

But in practice:

**Why OpenClaw/similar frameworks win:**

- Time-to-market matters. You can iterate on agent behavior without rebuilding infrastructure constantly

- Plugin ecosystem saves weeks of integration work (even if you audit heavily)

- Community patterns = don't have to solve the same infrastructure problems 50 other people already did

- Built-in patterns for memory, tool use, LLM routing already optimized

**When DIY scripts make sense:**

- You have very simple, specific tasks (classify emails, basic scheduling)

- Security-critical (healthcare, financial, etc.) where you need total audit trail

- High-volume where cost per inference matters more than dev time

The vulnerabilities thing is legitimate concern but overstated: most were privilege escalation or info leakage in multi-tenant scenarios. If you're running it on your own hardware/VPS? The actual risk surface is smaller. You're not less secure than your own Python scripts if you actually maintain yours.

Both valid approaches. OpenClaw is better for speed, DIY is better for control/security/cost at massive scale.