Never forget that this is a business as well as a hobby. There is no master plan in the free market.
i dare to object to you that the "free" market is a pure theoretical construct that never existed and cannot exist at all because non regulated markets are rigged very rapidly by concentrate invisible center of powers ....
The " apparently free and at the same time really not so free" market first conception is the fruit of a brain that lived in the first years of the 17 century.... Bernard Mandeville whom Hayek and Milton Friedman call "our master Brain".... Adam Smith steal from him not without ereasing the cynic and dreadful lucidity of Mandeville and veiling, with others after him, the not so "beautiful" idea of a so called market which seems free but which is not really free, with the more "noble" idea that it can be totally "free"...
There is no such thing as a "free" market , except in the head of Friedman and others...In the head of the genius Mandeville, the Market seems to be free but is not in reality, because there is 2 center of powers in any society that concentrate the power in the direction which is the best for them... Mandeville create centuries before Marx the idea of social competitive classes BUT not based on economical struggles at all but on socio- psychological power struggles between a psychotic elite and a psychopathic mafia, the nevrotic masses between these 2....He was less economically naive than even Marx or Smith...Mandeville even create psychoanalysis centuries before Freud, incredible but true....
Back to audio now...
In audio the interest of this non "free" and apparently free market is selling merchandise, not advising people that audiophile experience is possible at very low cost and with some simple means to controls the mechanical, the electrical and acoustical embeddings of the audio system...
It is the same thing in the pharma industry.... Is it some deep research about cheap generic medecine easily available ? No, there is no money there and no reason to invest in a low cost product with no more patent right attach to it and especially not if this cheap medecine work marvellously.... It is better for this non free and oriented market to create new products at higher cost for the consumers and to sell these to them, even if they dont work better and even if they work worst....
Economic science is way less scientific then astrology even for forecasting...Nobel economic prizes are mostly second grade mathematical prize at best or in the worse case an ideological prize...
1+1= 2
Merry Christmas and i apologize for my perhaps rude answer....
I wish you the best from my heart....