Very true. However, low-end and quality, more often than not, don't go together. It's like the old saying goes: you get what you pay for. Not to say that you're wrong, I totally agree with you; there should be quality software that isn't ridiculously expensive. A major contributor to the fact that reasonably priced software is rarely high-quality is that the company does not want to allocate a large budget which provides the resources to a product that isn’t going to turn a large profit. This makes perfect sense from that point of view.

On the other hand, a product doesn’t necessarily need a large budget to be high-quality, if there are people with the knowledge and the enthusiasm to create said software and not worry about profit. This, however, is extremely rare, which you’ve already pointed out.

I think licensing of technologies, and intellectual property, play a big part in driving costs of the final product up, especially when it comes to video related software.