This is spot on. If you want to build cheap anything, you need a whole cluster of organizations in close competition, with a lot of collective muscle memory and experience, doing that thing again and again and getting better and better at it. That's how any industry develops. It's that collective experience and network effects that you want to develop. Doing things infrequently as one-off projects by a company with no competition means that each one is going to be crazy expensive.

Honestly this is something I worry about with respect to outsourcing- people seem to not understand that once an industry leaves, it's not just a matter of bringing the capital back, it's that collective human skill that is the biggest thing you lose. The generation that used to do those jobs passes away and it's gone forever.