Actually, higher average prices are good because one can buy more things from Hawaii to compound with. If a book4 sells for 300k then you can buy much more NPC stuff than you could if it sold for 30k. Here in Cancer prices are high for v6 stuff (maybe I should sell my wizard suit ;) just kidding ^_^), but are very hard to make. I bought blue rider boots for 400k ( a fair price I think given the ingredients it needs) and light purple shoes for 300k, so even here that is at least 700k, then I needed blue woolen to make red flame shoes, another 120k, and that took two tries to make (the long purple boot method failed me :( ) Book 4s usually cost 30k ( I received mine from a couple of fighting guarnards. Now I'm at sharks). One failed red flame boots compound = 122k counting price of book four, but this is lucky since it was my only fail on the way to making the wizard suit.

So one can understand why cat claw boots are 2 mil: it needs five tough ingredients and probably has high fail rate because you cannot use an alchemy book.