The expense I think is just a side effect of working in this space. Mayne when things open up prices will go down. As for the softwares usability, I don't know how much it's changed in the 10 years since you saw it last, but I really like it. Everything is clickable, the work flow for flashing, symbol loading, fiddling with registers + peripherals, is better than really any other system I've used in the space.