If the frame and fork were decent quality, you could upgrade over time (which was common in my day, when solidly constructed Chromoly frame and forks were available on <$150 bikes), but they're just not. Even the $500 bikes of today will have lower cost aluminum or steel forks, even if the frame is a high quality material (like a better quality of aluminum of chromoly).
I don't understand the flight of American manufacturing well enough to know what was causative and what is merely correlation, but nearly all of the bikes when I was a kid were made in the US. As manufacturing has gone overseas, the quality has gone way down. I know that Chinese factories can make high quality bikes (because they make most of the high end brands, as well as the cheap ones); but, a lot of brands that used to mean "decent cheap bike" like Huffy and Schwinn and Mongoose mostly only mean "cheap", today (Schwinn still has some decent bikes in their higher end).
I've clearly got a lot of grumpiness about bikes! I may love bikes too much.
So we could reasonably predict, ignoring technology changes, that your $200 bike was at least twice as good as a $200 bike bought this year.
[1]: http://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=20...
My first bike (the Chromoly Huffy I mentioned a couple of posts back) cost a little less than $100 in about 1983. That same $100 is $242 today. $242 will actually buy an all Chromoly BMX bike today ( http://a.co/5vAYzBc ). So, I guess we're keeping pace with inflation, and I need to tie an onion to my belt, as was the fashion at the time. We just need to re-arrange our expectations to match current reality.
I sold my last bike for $50 after a decade of really hard city and trail riding, even taking a couple dives off the edge of a 20 foot fall and getting in a minor car accident.
That owner kept it for another decade and outside of normal part wear and repair, used it well for some pretty hardcore trail biking. It's now on at least it's 3rd owner and last I heard was going strong.
I bought that bike new in the late '80s for no more than $200 IIR, but the story of the bike sounds more like what I hear from modern $2k-$3k bikes...except without most of the fuss.
I feel like the market has really bifurcated into two segments:
a) what I'm willing to pay, but not made well
b) more than I'm willing to pay, and offers more performance than I'd ever conceivably use
I, and I'm sure many consumers, really would like some kind of middle ground.