I don't think the price reflects any particular attitude like arrogance or indifference - that would be bad for business. If anything, we've seen the costs rise significantly with high-end tactical scopes because the features we demand are that much more expensive to develop and implement. There was a post here a while back explaining how going from a magnification factor of four to five was almost twice as complicated, and going from five to six or seven, especially eight, has proven logarithmically complicated. It's not as simple as just controlling the position of the lens internals (unless it's an economy-level optic); a scope's ability to track reliably gets quite a bit more mechanically complicated with these specs we ask for like 1-8 or 3.5-26x. Add to that all of the other things we demand like lots of internal elevation, MTC, etc and the costs will rise. I think in a lot of cases scope manufacturers have to play a very complicated game of balancing properties to make a scope that we would buy in volume. If we didn't care how heavy or how long the scope was, it would probably be a lot easier or if we didn't care how consistently it tracked over the length of erector travel it would also be a lot easier - but all of these things we demand and that makes it extremely complicated and difficult. Manufacturing costs are one thing, R&D and development costs aren't directly compensated for and have to be rolled into the overall cost of the product. At least we have competition to drive innovation and production.
But then again who needs a Lamborghini either..
