Did I Expect too much?

What would you rather have to extract maximum profit with less overhead, a business model where you can sell a relatively small number of units with high profit margins or large number of units with small profit margins?  There is a third way, I seek out the small manufacturers with low overhead and reasonable pricing. Take a peak inside your audio components, if you have knowledge of parts cost you'll understand one facet of the price equation. Take in account packaging of component,  things like case work, speaker enclosures, these are things we can see with our own eyes and estimate value. We can also fairly estimate some overhead costs if we know about the facilities and number of employees at these firms. R&D costs certainly important as well, this much more difficult to cost out. Marketing/advertising another cost. Trying to be comprehensive here, but may have missed something in this short list. Using this information can certainly give us decent estimate of value, and I'm not saying an extremely high cost component couldn't possibly be good value. In the end law of supply and demand always wins out, high value consumer goods don't always win out in marketplace, in fact they probably rarely win out.

OP..."So yes, I was disappointed" Anyone in the hifi game is going to be disappointed MANY times during the upgrade path. Forget about your expectations and roll with the discovery of your personal tweeks improving things...That's the point of hifi. Hifi manfacturers are not here to meet your expectations.

Hey Jason,Now it's Trumps fault...lol.

Parts cost vs. total item selling price is always a black art. 

Back in the early '70's, I was a salesman in a small but decent audio shop. One of the perks was the discount offered to guys like me by manufacturers - want to know a product better?  Buy it for yourself at half the retail price.  It was my "after work" job and I never took a penny out of the store, but got quite a few items I still have and love. 

One was a speaker we sold for about $300 each. Nothing special, but I liked the sound dispersion because of a second tweeter on the back of the cabinet.  We had  a pair on display with the grills off, and some inquisitive patron decided to try seeing how much travel the 12" woofer had by just pushing on the cone.  We ordered a replacement driver and were amazed when it came in with a billed cost of $4.00!    

Our need for value has the bigger companies outsourcing to sweat shops to manage costs. There's also companies that invest in themselves, Dynaudio, KEF, Paradigm to name a few that do everything in house that has the benefit of controlling markup, but the current state of high end pricing has put many brands catering to the 1%. It would be hard to take a modern brand seriously that used spring clip wire retainers for their products.