The argument for buying Dom3 presupposes that you actually like fantasy TBS games, else why buy it in the first place? I detest race car games and I wouldn't buy them at even a $1 price tag, no matter how good graphics, controls, physics simulation etc etc. Hell, I wouldn't take one of those for free unless to give as a gift, because they take up space I am not willing to allocate to them.
The costs of development vs other games where millions were used is a total non-starter, because the ones that do get that kind of budgets are mass-market games while Dom3 is a niche market game. If you had any real competition in this niche with other comparable games, price reduction might be necessary for Dom3, but so far I haven't seen much in the way of viable competition and neither apparently have Shrapnel.
As far as the positions expressed in this thread, I don't think anyone is about to change their positions much. It's been discussed before and it never happened those times either.
So in that respect it's going to be
