In regards to prices;
When I played Final Fantasy 11 a few years back, it was very common to be paying several million more than your current equipment for marginal upgrades, it's the way games work - all these small aspects add up when put together, which is why the cost increases a lot.
From a business perspective, it's logical, there will always be people who strive to be the best and want the best things in order to keep themselves at the top, thus there will always be people paying those top prices. Sure it sucks for the average consumer who will probably never reach that goal without years of work (Yes I fully understand this from the several games i've played) but some items are just not meant for everybody to attain in their game-life time.

I'll give a real big example of this; On FF11 there was this one enemy, he was called Absolute Virtue, the conditions for releasing him were ridiculiously long and he was near impossible to kill without some super secret method that only the creators knew how to do in order to make it killable. It dropped some pretty damn nice items, took several years and many thousands of different theories to actually get a workable kill to get these items, and even then it may even drop one item when you could need upto 64 players to kill it.

Anyways, just an example of a game where items aren't meant for everyone.