In the digital world quality is a post purchase signal and the ability for consumers to communicate about quality has basically been destroyed by allowing paid counterparts by businesses to drown out the signal

> There is absolutely a lot of profiteering (charge what we can, not what we need to) happening

I think that profiteering is the default behavior for companies. Maybe not all companies behave this way, or maybe in the past it wasn't the default behavior, but I'm very confident it is now