It's all relative. It has gotten at least an order of magnitude less expensive over the last 10-15 years- 3D printing, low cost PCB manufacturers, availability

It's all relative. It has gotten at least an order of magnitude less expensive over the last 10-15 years- 3D printing, low cost PCB manufacturers, availability and cost of automated machine tools like CO2 laser-cutters. It has actually gotten to a point where often time is the most "expensive" component of hobby/open-source hardware projects- while the cost of CAD software has decreased (mostly due to competition and increased demand that allows to spread the development cost over larger customer base), the productivity of CAD-related tasks has not increased much, if at all.