Unfortunately, you seem to have torpedoed your own argument. There are people quite willing to buy the card -which is tacit agreement between the buyer and the company. Nvidia holds no monopoly, and certainly isn't strong arming people to buy the card. You draw the line at $500- there are a huge amount of people who would balk at spending even half that amount on a card. To them (and some of them post here), buying any card over $250 is akin to burning money.
And a third and fourth card of any description for SLI or CrossfireX falls into the same category.
How much extra performance do you get for that third or fourth card for the expenditure ? For that matter, what about bespoke water cooling ? Using SSD's for storage or in RAID 0 ?
For
you, any of these things would likely represent "wasteful spending", as probably would a luxury car, an expensive hobby, a Raymond Weil or Rolex watch, or any other number of supposedly unsound fiscal purchases...but what might be prohibitively expensive for you, might represent a drop in the bucket for others. I might spend five figures building an engine that gets 8 miles per gallon (if I'm lucky) and gets used in twelve second increments- but the enjoyment far outweighs the fiscal
irresponsibility.
Pretty much any enthusiast tech purchase is a case of diminishing returns. But what's the alternative? Buy a bang-for-buck ultra safe OEM box knowing you're losing less on depreciation, and put the saved cash into T-bills ?
Where's the fun in living to be 110 years old if you have to live off bran flakes every day to get there ?