There is a bigger hole in the theory than that. If speakers can only be compared against their price, then Axiom speakers are really bad or they should start selling cheap speakers for 10,000$ and suddently become "good". There are a lot of people out there trying to sell you fantasies and illusions, from speakers cables at 43,000$ a pair to special "spray" to help wi-fi connections. So you cannot just look at price tags. Poor engineer will naturally lead to higher prices in the long run (you probably know this for true if you are in or involved with engineering companies); so a company can honestly sell speakers at 5000$ because that is their cost, while another company (whose name I will omit but can be seen in the top-left corner of this page) will achieve the same quality at 1500$ just because of work ethic and management. And let's not forget to remove comparison between direct-sales prices and retail-sales prices.
Anyway, as you hinted, once you eleminate all the frauds and the bad management, engineering, YES, this is a worthwhile debated. Unfortunately, once we removed those elements, the choice will remain between a handfull (may be two) of companies.
