The nutshell takeaway here is that concrete reductions in costs will always outweigh greater but less concrete increases in costs, because... well George Carlin covered that.

My theory is it's a classic cargo cult situation: "If we just do the same thing this successful startup did (we'll ignore that they were doing it in a different context for different reasons, and ignore the ones that did the same thing but weren't successful) then we too will have the same explosive success!"

?