Earlier quoted context omitted.
You make some great points, however I question how big the Kansas market really is. I'm from a 150,000 person city in the Midwest, and there might be 5 taxis operating in town. Kansas has a few bigger cities, but the demand for personal drivers in the Midwest isn't like it is on the coasts.
Isn't this about scale? Sure, the market isn't all that large, but the means, methods, process required to serve it are the same ones that will absolutely be needed to cope with all the different markets, rules, and authorities out there. A billion dollar level company can and should be doing this.
As someone that's from Wichita, I can say that the market is very small in terms of utilization. Most of the people who could afford Uber either own a car or have sufficient access to public transit to their satisfaction. The rest of us slobs who have to nickle/dime our wages are stuck with less than optimal transportation regardless of Uber's presence in the state or not. Basically, Wichita and other Kansas cities are huge for their population. Wichita along is about 8x7 miles if I remember right. And this excludes suburbs and outlying communities in and out of the county. KCMO is a bit more packed in from what I remember, but not by much. So, for Uber and its drivers to make money they'd need a relatively steady volume of riders to and from places of work and shopping. In Wichita, that's pretty hard to sustain since our employment centers are split up between downtown and East/West Wichita (Cessna, Spirit, Hawker-Beech, and etc). The rest of the employers are along the northside but they're not exactly high wage payers (Does Coleman do any work out there anymore aside from the gas bottling plant?). All in all, Wichita would suck for Uber regulations or no.