I guess you might be right. It would be silly to risk entire plant down due to a small PCB broken. Same goes for important machinery that can't be now controlle

I guess you might be right. It would be silly to risk entire plant down due to a small PCB broken. Same goes for important machinery that can't be now controlled because an encoder failed. There is just no connection between the cost of components and the value they are generating and possible costs of downtime. On the other hand you have probably low production volumes because there is no mass market for these parts. And that then causes some stupid stuff to costs hundreds or thousands of dollars.