Now you can drop in a forced reset trigger (FRT) for about $250 into any AR15. This still meets the definition of a semiautomatic rifle (one pull of the trigger per round fired) while enabling the user to shoot at fully automatic speeds.
The text book industry inflated the cost of everything by making things huge, with mostly meaningless full color pictures everywhere. Go back 100 years and compare the size of a math book to present day. Math hasn’t changed a whole lot but the size and weight of the books certainly has.
Same goes for the first model year of vehicles