I’m less talking about consumer protections so much as “this is what the product looks like, it’s not just bad QC; a replacement will look just as bad”

True, but there’s very little way of gauging quality up front, and once you have the product in-hand you’re basically stuck with it. It’s not like you can hold the vendor to account and demand something that looks like the product photos.

This is why there will always be a niche for the more expensive group buy model: it won’t be for everyone (and the price does exclude some people), but the expectation is that you’ll get the product you paid for, and you can hold the vendor to account if something goes wrong.

I remain hopeful that it’ll be possible to make injection moulded sets cheaper without sacrificing quality. There’s always going to be more esoteric designs for which this isn’t possible, but the obvious slam dunk designs deserve to be made in larger quantities where economies of scale come into play, lowering the barrier to entry. We’re starting to see this with sets from Domikey, PBTFans, Mode and Drop. They’re not cheap enough yet imho, but it’s still early days.

Hopefully this goes some way to explaining why clones cost less.