Technically i am an "unskilled worker" because i did not finish university. Didn't stop me from being the guy who develops the network chips in the company.
Regarding 1.: in my country, sadly it does. No fancy paper telling that you can do X means "can't do X" even if you can show what you have done. In way too many places.
Sometimes, data must be transmitted and received in a more precise way that a normal Ethernet could ever do. You see, those robotics people think "realtime" means to have a message delivered within a millisecond.
In my system I know where the bits are down to five picoseconds. This requires technology that is a tad more complex than just throwing a dumb PC at the problem (even if it runs Linux).