I think everywhere you go there's going to be different levels of service/quality/price. And it's up to the consumers to figure out who is who. At one time data recovery work here was limited to just a few companies with almost no competition and the average recovery was the price of a new car.
Now there are a lot more companies able to offer comparable services thanks largely to Ace Laboratory's willingness to sell a system which has most of that reverse engineering work built in or explained in the documentation. We no longer need our own team of engineers, as we are all buying the research of one team in Russia.
Then there's the guys out there advertising data recovery for $79 who are just running some free/cheap data recovery software and have no tools/expertise to even properly evaluate or handle any sort of hardware issues (though it doesn't stop them from trying).
Now, it's up to the consumer to decide where to go. Some people still want to send their drive to DriveSavers and pay thousands of dollars because they perceive that they will get the best service that way and their data is too important to take risks. (though those of us who've recovered drives they gave up on would debate whether they are the "best" or even close to that).
Others decide to go the $79 guy, take the risk, and end up with striped platters after a night of the freezer and two days of SpinRite running on the drive.
Personally, I've decided to not even chase the super "budget" conscious customers. I'll let them go to $300DDR or the $79 guy. I've found that you actually get better customers if you price yourself a little higher and just concentrate on the quality of your work/service.