It is often posted that the stratospheric high price of some high end cables is due to the extensive R & D that goes into the formulation of the final cable.
This is just my opinion, but when I hear this I wonder what kind of jobs the posters have/had to think that designing, producing and testing audio cables is a very challenging job. Again, my opinion, but from my viewpoint it sounds like a rather straight forward and mundane task of combining various metals, insulators and connecters (probably provided by subcontractors), to produce a final desired outcome. Even with 1000s of different possible combinations how long do you think it would take a few people to perform? In my world it better not take too long or your history.
I just think that compared to the universe of semi-sophisticated jobs, this does not strike me as approaching rocket science.