I don't agree with "fighting back". If anything, cheaper gear of all kinds has improved vastly as a result of the "1%" buying the super-over-engineered products. As I've pointed out, you can get $50 IEMs now that sound fantastic. To add to that, If you want a pair of excellent headphones for a few hundred dollars, I'd pick, maybe surprisingly, a pair of Sony 1000X Bluetooth, noise-cancelling headphones, as you don't need anything beyond your smart phone to get excellent sound, if not a Sony Walkman with high-res transmission.
Anyhow, if people with a lot of money want to spend, who are we to argue? The most useful course of action is to appreciate what we have and are able to get.
The real question of this thread should be: Why are there more multi-thousand-dollar high-end headphones being made recently? And the answer is because people with money want to buy the best a manufacturer can make. Why is anyone offended by this?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming to be holier than thou, since I regard myself as part of the problem. I too spend way too much money on technology. Though I'm certainly more cynical about it today than I was a few years ago, just out of experience.
Also, I semi agree with you about cheaper gear being improved as a direct result of the 1%, though to a limited context. I think the popularity of extreme priced premium audio-fi gear is a mostly separate phenomenon, and that the increase in better lower priced audio equipment correlates more to trends and developments in manufacturing.
As someone who delves in overseas manufacturing for parts of my business, I think the improvements in affordable audio products are more to do with cheaper, easier, more advanced, and more globalised mass manufacturing options (eg Chinese, South Asian low cost manufacture), as well as the increased competitiveness it has brought with it.
You have these huge factories that are essentially already manufacturing low, mid and hi-fi equipment for big brand names from around the world, and often times they absorb the know how, R&D, processes, functions etc, themselves improving, advancing or developing methods, technologies etc, and then applying that to other often far cheaper, less prominent brands, products etc, with far more limited marketing, market share etc, and as a result, much less mark-up.
In that sense it is much easier today, for a person with some decent audio engineering knowledge, to start a new company producing new headphones/earphones, because low cost manufacturing options are far more accessible and prevalent.
Then you also have modders, companies etc who are able to take capable but cheap mass produced drivers, and mod or manufacture housing at lower costs to essentially extract more from them (see Mad Dog, TX00, E-MU etc).
Regarding the point about why there are more multi thousand dollar headphones, I think you're on the money (pun intnded), because there's that tiny minority of super wealthy hobbyists who are willing to keep forking out for it. Not necessarily because they want the best that a particular manufacturer can offer, rather because they simply want the best full stop, and as a result of marketing, hype etc, have been convinced that spending more and more money, is necessary to achieve that.
The irony is, I'm not really sure that high end headphone technology really has advanced that much in the last few decades, at least not in terms of the resulting audio performance. Are the super expensive headphones of today really that much, if any better than the golden oldies like the Sony MDR-R10's or the Stax SR-009's (which were themselves exorbitently priced at the time)?
