If the knockoff makers paid for what they stole they wouldn't be thieves. Instead they would be doing what CRKT and Spyderco and KaBar and other manufactures do, license the design, partner with the maker to credit and promote them and share in the profits. Instead you see American and European makers getting nothing for their hard work while fellow Americans pay thieves for the makers' talent and designs. Nearly as bad is that these knives are against the law to import into the U.S. because of the fed prohibition on autos. They're part of a black market that people who are ignorant or just don't care fund buying them. Heck, I wouldn't mind if they were German or Italian or French or Spanish design and manufacture because the laws against automatic knives is ridiculous, but stealing a maker's designs and then breaking the laws to bring them in because we provide a ready market for the theft of intellectual property goes way beyond getting a toggle lock or pick lock made by Heubertus or A. G. Capoline off some dealer's table at a show.
The least expensive reasonable quality OTFs are the H&K and Paragon lines. Anything much cheaper isn't going to meet a reasonable quality level beyond novelty envelope knife (Schrade makes a line of "assisted opening OTF" knives in the range, but they're pretty sloppy and depend upon the user to push them far enough for spring engagement opposed to pushbutton action), unless they're pot metal parts instead of 6061T6 Aluminum and hundredths tolerances instead of 0.001-0.0015 (half a thousandth on the blades in a Paragon) and paint on the pot metal or uneven finishes instead of coating or anodizing and no business taxes paid and workers paid at minimal American standards for their skill and no customer service or warranty possible and no partnering with the people who come up with the successful designs...like the Lightnings of the knife world.
As to demand making OTFs available at lower prices because volume would go up and per unit price would drop, this misses the tolerances fit requirements for an OTF with acceptable performance for real EDC use and that means tight QC and even hand fitting. It also presumes the development of that demand which isn't there. Benchmade and Buck know exactly how to optimize production to produce products at any price point they are willing to produce. They're not making $80 OTFs because they've already determined there's insufficient market to make money on them at the volume needed to do so. BM makes those HK OTFs that I recommended as the minimum reliable quality and you can buy one for over $100, but you won't see them crank out a $40 or $50 or even an $80 one because they can't get the quality to avoid the product liability and damage to their reputation for reliability and performance. Lester and C.J. are smart businessmen with good engineers and lawyers and production folks and they don't make the knife you envision because they can't, not because they won't.
SOG somehow cranks out quality side autos you can find for under, well under, $100 and
Kershaw has for just a bit more than SOG, but it is amazing they can do it. Neither of them have produced an OTF at all much less in the same, much less the cheaper, range as the much easier to produce side openers.
The only way to sell the unicorn of the under $80 OTF made here with current technology is to make too many parts offshore used in them so you only have to drop in the springs and screw them together (assuming the tolerances are maintained), which violates Customs. Now that the Chinese, Kizer, Reat, ..., have stepped into the same U.S. market price range as BM and ZT with equivalent quality products I suspect you'll see them produce an OTF within a couple of years by blanking in China and shipping those "materials" to finish here at the needed tight tolerances (legal since you can't assemble a knife from just blanked handle halves and a blade without a final edge), but THAT knife will be $100-$150 on the street because those final machining steps and finer fit and finishing is where the majority of cost comes from.
Sure there's snobbery in the OTF market. That's partly because of the "forbidden fruit" aspect of autos drive the price up, which Knife Rights has been effectively chipping away at state by state and may effectively remove if they can get the fed switchblade law amended. BUT that snobbery can't account for the price difference you're imagining since none of the smaller more aggressive shops with lower overhead and hungry owners out there are (like
RAT Worx) jumping into the middle market with anything produced in the U.S. that has the needed tolerances/quality to seize that middle ground. The best that's been done in driving price down by a small hungry company is the Paragon line for $170 at KnifeCenter.
I've had these discussions with the manufacturers and I've been in the shops watched the machining and assembly and I've even assembled Micros and Paragons myself. Because of that I see that a spring driven machine that needs tolerances of a thousandth to work reliably and properly (and will be used by the public as if it were a fixed blade) isn't in the cards for them until additive manufacturing makes some significant strides and the price of equipment to print the bodies comes down a great deal. When that happens, you may see the $80 U.S. OTF, but it will have an MSRP of $120 and be discounted down to the $70-$80 price range because a dealer is willing to sell more than the next dealer who needs to make a few more points on the product.
