Actually, from what I recall of Jerry's post about Competition blades, they were not intended to be less expensive. The issue was that they were fully convexed, and doing that tended to mar the coating, so the purpose was to trade the coating for a better edge. I remember him saying that the reasons he was asking if people were interested was because people were asking for un-coated blades, but that due to the additional labor on the edge, they would cost as much as if they were coated.

As to the HR price; I didn't get in when they were first released, but I paid $342 each for military overruns (admittedly, they had mag G10 handles) at the 12/2007 Razorganza.