It isn’t even about people willing to buy at $X. The Pi foundation has to pay for RAM like everyone else.

The purpose of the Pi is affordable computing for learning. That's pointless if the system is very expensive.

It was their stated mission, yes.

'Our mission is to put high-performance, low-cost, general-purpose computing platforms in the hands of people and organisations all over the world,'

Hard to do that when you keep jacking the prices up.