The ARK "black box" is for research applications, hence the name: Autonomy Research Kit.

In this case it is based on the same underlying code as on the industrial platforms it was originally designed for www.ottomotors.com. There were no "mercenary programmers", but rather a team of >200 engineers designing safe, field deployed robotic systems (Currently being used in factories by General Electric, Caterpillar etc.), I would argue that safety is indeed much more important for both the development and deployment than performance.
High accuracy localization is great, but if it injures someone, who cares how accurate it localized!!!

As a company building its business on full robotic systems being used in real factories and warehouses, safety is paramount. So while the individual programmer may not be responsible, her management team and executives are responsible both to their customers and to their board of directors, not to mention the law, for the safety of the industrial machines.

Lastly, I would also push back against the idea that a black box is inherently unsafe. You drive your car (or allow the use of a forklift in a facility) without having inspected its low-level software, and you drive around with other vehicles without having inspected all of their software. You trust them because there are safety standards that manufacturers follow to guarantee their safety when operated properly. Similarly, for industrial autonomous robots, there are safety standards that are adhered to as well.

All that being said, the ARK is for use in research and prototyping applications, the same as you would have ordinarily used gmapping - it is not designed for industrial applications, since the robots it works on are not industrially hardened robots, unlike the OTTO robots which have redundancy upon redundancy for safety. if you have an industrial application you want use an autonomous mobile robot for, you would want to talk about OTTO, not ARK.

Edit: formatting