Some very good points raised there guys, thanks for all your imput.
I completely understand that the design of the lure, and how much R & D goes into it's performance and production, are factors in lure pricing, so much so that it went without saying in my original post (that's my bad, sorry).
It just seems to me that having made a reasonable number of lures myself, and had some success on them, I tend to think that GT's aren't perhaps as fussy as many believe, and maybe the lure designs required for catching these great fish are not as advanced as boutique tackle manufacturers may have us believe. Certainly I am not professing to know a huge amount about GTs, but my observations thus far have pointed towards this notion.
Another issue raised in the above posts is lure copying.......every lure is designed for the same purpose, obviously to catch fish, but in order to do that, some lures might need a certain feature to best achieve this. So if a lure X has this certain feature, which has already been used in another brand or model of lure Y, does it make lure X a copy of lure Y? Obviously, blatant rip-offs like the example Brandon mentioned are another kettle of fish, and not fair on the original manufacturer (in this case Chris), who put in the hard yards to get the best lure design he possibly could onto the market.
So is using the features of one lure in a new lure classed as 'copying'? When does a lure become different enough to not to be called a "copy"? Or is that like asking 'how long is a piece of string'?
Cheers
Angus