*cough*D&D Beyond*cough*

Why would they not not focus on the low hanging fruit where there is a need, and not any officially supported competition?

Because they are standing at a point of change. A point where they can hold their head up high and claim they are the market leader I character generation tools. Because they could open their pockets up to a bigger market that is addicted to digital tools.

I bought HERO LAB. It is the initial price hurdle you jump before you can extend the product to have support for various RPGs.

What is the timeline for getting Starfinder to the core Hero Lab product?

There is no way I am buying into a new system - if you want to compete with yourself, have a good time. When I bought Hero Lab, I had certain expectations about being able to extend it and observing a different product get Starfinder support is immensely disappointing and worrisome.

EDIT: This is from the store page for Hero Lab:

"We license the right to produce data packages for almost every game system Hero Lab supports. That means we're working directly with the companies that produce your favorite games, so we can ensure that our software supports their games optimally."

You might want to amend to include 'except for IPs we wish to put in other products" or pull it entirely since it is less than truthful.

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They don't currently have plans to make Starfinder for desktop Herolab. You also do not have to buy a "new system" to use HLO, what you buy for desktop will be usable for HLO once the support is added. They have mentioned a migration fee for Pathfinder but you then get a pretty much equal credit for the server maintenance fee.

So the 80+ hours (and that is a conservative estimate) I have invested in adding custom settings and races will transport to HLO? I will be able to use that same knowledge gleaned from legacy with HLO to continue to make new rules for custom settings and races?

Correct on all counts.

One thing I'll warn you is that once we have PF and PF user content ready for HLO, any custom classes or archetypes may take some tweaking for it. Any needed adjustments should be straightforward, though, since it's about unifying how some similar-but-not-identical ways of doing things work across multiple game systems.