There are many kinds of great engineering. Lego making billions and billions of really cheap little plastic bricks that last forever and click together no matter when you bought them is one kind of great engineering, so is SpaceX.
Really cheap? I have a friend who is a single mother with a 7-year-old Lego addict, who also loves all things Jurassic World. The only Lego sets available in the aisles of the big box stores around us (conveniently placed at 7-year-old height) are the egregiously over-priced officially licensed movie tie-in kits. I was shocked to see some of these relatively small kits selling for over $100, the cheap ones being in the $40s to $60s. My friend's income (with food stamps) is roughly $1,000 a month... So her son has to feel constantly deprived of the cool toys he really wants. I confess I ordered a knock-off set from AliExpress for his Christmas present last year, he got dozens of Jurassic World-ish Lego-like bricks and it cost me less than $20, shipped. I had very positive feelings about Lego as a kid. Now I see them as just like any other business, engineering desires into their target market and exploiting those desires for maximum profit.
For the purpose of a discussion about engineering, each brick _is_ really cheap. The argument is that something they manufacture and retail for a dime or less is engineered to exacting tolerances.
Think about it: You buy a Tesla Model X for Unobtainium money, and there are panel gaps. But you buy a bucket of Lego bricks for $20, and each one clicks together perfectly.
Lego may be expensive for a tiny blob of plastic, but the point I'm making is that their engineering is amazing relative to the cost of each brick.
p.s. That being said, I hear you! The sets with authorized franchise tie-ins are expensive, in large part because a sizeable part of their market are adults with disposable income. There is no other explanation for a CAD800 Millennium Falcon with 7,500 pieces.
Think about it: You buy a Tesla Model X for Unobtainium money, and there are panel gaps. But you buy a bucket of Lego bricks for $20, and each one clicks together perfectly.
Automotive body panels are large and relatively flexible, hence harder to get close tolerances on. Small injection-molded parts, however, can be made to much closer tolerances and the process has been around for over half a century.
Their sets have always been expensive, though my older (late 80s through late 90s) ones were much bigger for a comparable price (with similar or smaller part counts—they love putting hundreds of tiny little pieces for really fiddly construction in modern sets, it's awful, I assume CAD or something is to blame) but a regular old box o' bricks is pretty cheap, and if you're not trying to buy complete high-demand sets they're cheap in mixed brick lots on ebay, too.
