The big problem is really just market demand. Figure skating is just less popular than hockey, so boots will be more expensive and will have less technological innovation behind them. It's a problem of the sport of figure skating as a whole. Figure skating is really still a rich man's sport. Even on the USFSA website for grants for skaters I remember reading "For children whose parents make under $200,000 a year combined household income" and that sounds laughable, you know, 200K is extremely rich in an era where official unemployment is 10%, but at the same time, figure skating is an expensive sport. Coaches where I am are like $50-80 an hour, and it's not uncommon for parents to just pay a coach here for like, "unlimited" coaching, like 20-30K a year.
By nature, it obviously is a more expensive sport, unlike basketball or soccer or something, it needs to be done on artificial ice, and a rink costs at least 500K or so a year to operate, and I don't think rink management is a serious money maker by any stretch. I know one rink near me's been bankrupt like 3 times and has even at times, when the power company shut their power off, switched to a diesel generator and then got their oil shut off by the oil company. So the reality is, it'll probably remain a rich man's sport for a long time, just because artificial ice is so expensive by nature of being artificial ice. At my rink, there's Russians and Eastern Europeans that come from their home countries, paid for by the governments of their respective countries, just because there's very little ice there.
That's the reality of figure skating, $1000 skates is just a symptom of it, if you think about it. So if you want skate prices to go down, you need a bigger market of people actually buying skates for the competitive level, and figure skating would have to be a more open sport. Any kind of "closed" sport just is expensive. Ice skating at least sorta has a logical reason to be expensive, but like, Olympic style weightlifting is a sport I'm kinda getting into now, and the coaching costs just as much as skating coaching does, plates cost comparatively a lot , about $2 a pound (for what they are, just giant blocks of rubber,) and then there's shoes. The cheapest shoes you can get are $80, weightlifting shoes are a lot like ice skates, in that they have a raised solid heel to hit depth easier. For a custom pair of lifting shoes, it's easy to spend like $500+ on them. Before the Chinese really hit the market with shoes, the cheapest Olympic lifting shoes were $200 Adidas. And weightlifting doesn't even require artificial ice, just it's so niche of a sport that people can kinda charge whatever. Same way Ferrari parts cost more than Toyota parts, it's not that Ferrari parts are necessarily inherently more complex or something, it's just there's not a big market.
As far as the actual boots themselves, well, I can make another post about that, but that's the reason why figure skating boots are expensive. The only real way to get them cheaper (besides China obviously being involved no matter what) is to open up the sport of figure skating more, and get more people skating.
EDIT:
Regarding my Edeas, they fit well without being heated, but Edeas you actually aren't supposed to bake, you're supposed to only heat certain spots up with a heat gun, basically doing the same thing as punching would. You could also perhaps run a shoe stretcher after heating with the heat gun, though. Edea really cautions against baking the skates, in fact they say to not even leave them in a hot car, because it could re heat form the skate again. Instead of gel packs in Edeas, the fiberglass/plastics themselves heat form. As far as the stiffness, they're supposed to be extra stiff straight from the factory. The guy I bought them from said Edea only does it for a select few people. He was selling non-extra stiff ones, too. He bought a few pairs, the reason he sold was because he switched to 300mm instead of 290, so I got his 290s.
But I think manufacturers will eventually do what Edea's doing regarding materials. In hockey they already do. No hockey skates except for Graf are predominantly leather anymore. Most are fiberglass with some carbon fiber parts sometimes. It's cheaper and easier to work with a skate that way. I've tried on whatever the new CCM $60 skates were, and new Bauer Vapors and Supremes, and to be honest, they're fantastic quality skates. For the same $60 spent (well Vapors run like 90-100,) I don't see any figure skates even near in quality and boot stiffness. And the reason again, is, more people play hockey, thus development goes faster and the trickle down happens quicker. And speed skates, while they cost more, are light as feather and feel like wearing shoes. Much of what's holding figure skates back is tradition and resistance to change. People like the leather boots, people like the brands that have been around forever, and are resistant to change.
But, somewhere along the line, the Chinese will invade. They already have, if you go on, say, alibaba.com, look up figure skates, you'll see boots that look identical to Riedells and other's lowend boot models, so the manufacturers already work with the Chinese to make lower end boots, but the Chinese aren't dumb, and not everything they make has to be inherently low quality. So if someone really wanted to, and felt it'd be a profitable thing to do, they could easily have the Chinese make high quality stuff. I witnessed this occur with airsoft guns (plastic pellet guns for playing wargames with) there were a few Japanese makers, the Chinese made low quality stuff, and in a span of like 2-3 years they were on par with the Japanese, and then in 4-5 had pretty much overtaken them, and made higher quality stuff for significantly less money (ie, a gun that would have sold for 1000+ before the Chinese, you can buy the Chinese equivalent for like $200-300.) Figure skating is a hard market to crack, though, as it is so "closed" of a market, and it's a small market also. I think the reason why the owners of the major skate companies haven't worked with the Chinese for a low priced high quality boot is mostly for image. They'd have to fire the US/Canadian/German workers that make the high quality boots, and that's not really a good PR move. That, and having things made in China doesn't really bode well with a "premium" image, either.
Oh well, sorry for my essay about figure skating boot prices.