Reading this thread, two things kept popping up for me.
The first is something called the Veblen Effect, which is the phenomena where when something is priced higher, we humans tend to think it also has greater value, which is often not true (and sometimes it is...). The example given when I first read about this was college tuition. Colleges found that when they lowered prices to get more enrollment, enrollment fell off. They found that if they raised prices then enrollment increased. They learned they had to have a good story about why the price was so high/going up, but that was all.
The second thing that came up was the whole thing about what is needed in a high end audio component for it to be considered high end. This question was first put to me 30 years ago so I've had a lot of time to think about it:
High end audio is driven by intention, not price.
What this means is that if something is carefully engineered, it can sound better or perform better (depending entirely on which metric is more important to you) than something costing several times more. This might happen because a product is priced to a formula rather than what the market will bear or it might simply be engineered better (which might cost more in R&D but might be cheaper in production). If a designer's intention is to do the best he can with the best components he can get, it may or may not be more expensive. IOW price really has nothing to do with it which is not the same as saying it will be cheap- it might be very expensive. Until you know a lot more about the product and the designer's intention, there really isn't any way to know.
A third thing pops up for me upon writing this. The best in any human endeavor tend to be best because they love it, not because they want to make money. If they got rich doing it so much the better.