As with any material, there is an economy of scale curve of manufacturing costs vs quantity. The simple version is that if you can sell enough of any one thing, you can set up to manufacture it for a relatively low cost above materials. But, if you only need to make a little bit of something, the per unit cost is going to be fairly high. This applies (broadly, and with exceptions) to just about anything from jacobs drill chucks to obsolete composite materials.
Take a material like corian. It's not easy to make either, maybe not as difficult as bakelite, or maybe it is, but the thing is that you can sell thousands of square feet of it for countertops, so that drops the per unit cost down to the point that we often sell the stuff by 30 pound boxes for small money. Now there is not much demand for bakelite anymore, all the everyday items that used to be made with it are MUCH cheaper to make out of modern thermoplastics. So the market for it is limited to specialty artistic type stuff like making pens and such. Not going to sell thousands of pounds of a single color just for that, so the production costs for modern material are astronomical.
That's why it's often cheaper (and more fun) to find a stash of 50 year old material somewhere and snag it.
In a very simplified and broadly applied way, YMMV!
