Speaker design is in it's incremental phase-- improvements at the high end are especially incremental. This is truer today than ever before.
Manufacturers are no longer pricing based upon value-- PRICE IS THE NEW VALUE. We live in the land of confirmation bias and hyper-inequality.
There are fewer people in the middle class people in the U.S. today as a percentage of population than there has been since the Great Depression-- and it's getting manifestly worse by the year. Makes you wonder whether most mfg.'s making high-end gear take this situation into account when designing product lines.
A lot of gear is simply designed and priced accordingly, knowing that true market size has shrunk, but those left who can by products like these often have more wealth than ever before.
Most billionaires pay little to no income tax-- fools think they're smart-- no the system has been rigged so that everyone ELSE pays their share for them.
Now having said all of this that does not mean that a set of speakers like the FR30's are price gouging-- they are not cheap to make-- but if you were to take a look at the true profit margins (and no, it has not always been like this) you would see that margins have not shrunk, they're larger! Larger than they have ever been before, at the top-end.
There's still a lot of value in the lower end of these kinds of products-- but price is also equated with quality of sound in audiophile-land that, and over time that helps build the confirmation bias that they knowingly or otherwise rely upon to sell the high-priced gear. Slap an extra 50-100% of mark-up on a top shelf product makes sense under our present scenario. More money for them and more confirmation bias for you! Not exactly a win-win, but if you have the dough, who cares!
In a land of haves and have-nots, you are what you earn.
In the long run this is a toxic situation, a perversion of capitalism, and it will end very very badly as these trend keep rolling on, and the inequality reaches a level that is completely incompatible with a functioning democracy.
We're actually already there but most people are unaware of all of this macroeconomic data-- the U.S., by the numbers is more oligarchy than democracy-- and that means consumer spending power is right there with it.
Now back to the music!