Yes, I believe the marketing chaps call it "perceived value". Not saying it's a rip-off, but I believe the technology is becoming so widespread now (and with projects like OpenPilot bringing prices down), they will not be able to support those prices for much longer. I'm also a photographer - I understand and agree with what you say about your fees - but the important analogy is in the equipment itself: I have many clients ask me "how many mexapixels is that?" and when I tell them, they say "ooh! I've got a [insert brand] in my pocket that's nearly the same!" Of course, they don't understand that not all pixels are born equal or treated equally after birth.
In the MR world, though, things really are more equal: as long as you can lift your camera/sensor/whatever into the sky you can get the job done, whether your craft is home-built for $500 or you bought it from Microdrones for $50,000. Because, indeed, these manufacturers cannot claim that their platform does the job any better in terms of stability, flight times, etc. In fact, they are often rather outdated technology with shockingly "ordinary" performance by today's standards.
Of course, open source products are a hard sell into corporations. Remember, though, that OpenPilot is exactly that: open source! So a company (including Draganfly!) could take the designs, manufacture the hardware themselves and sell a high-spec platform at a reasonable/appropriate price without having to claw back $20million in R&D costs. Now that would put the cat amongst the pigeons!
