NVMe is a niche, just like WD VelociRaptor drives were back in the day, and niche products cost more. The only reason we're seeing a proliferation of NVMe products is because every SSD manufacturer and his dog is using the performance of their NVMe drives as a penis-measuring contest (just look at the advert for the ADATA SU8200 that's featured on the main page of this very site).
Unfortunately those manufacturers have yet to figure out that almost nobody cares about solid-state drives that can transfer gigabytes of data per second and do thousands of IOPS, because almost nobody has that sort of workload. Instead, most people want something that has a far lower latency than HDDs, which - guess what - any SSD provides, even the slowest SATA models.
I'm quite certain that if someone released a SATA SSD that could read/write at a mere 150MB/s (SATA1) but had cost/GB of only twice that of a HDD, that product would fly off the shelves like nobody's business. And we are getting there with QLC, despite the FUD that's spread like manure every time QLC is mentioned (see this thread for examples). We've seen this idiocy before when we went from MLC to TLC and guess what, it was all nonsense, and there's zero reason or evidence to believe QLC will be a failure or problematic either.
Samsung's already announced their high-capacity QLC "860 QVO" consumer SSD range which should be available by December... does anyone here really believe that arguably the world's most important player in the consumer SSD space, would announce a product they don't have faith in?
