I am a consumer, I am an idiot. With the exception of when buying/building computers, I am an idiot. I do of course do research before buying anything, but there will probably be better for what I payed or for what I want, and someone that knows the specific area could have told me that straight away. Take for example a mobile phone. I use my phone for texting and making calls, that is it, I Think in the last 5 years I've taken about 3 pictures with my phone too. In the last 5 years, I've been through 3 phones. The first lasted ~3 and half years, it was a Motorola Razr V3i. I loved it, but managed to kill it by leaving it in my pocket, then putting the jeans with phone in the washing machine. I could still text, but couldn't speak. I got a new phone, I don't even remember the model, it was £10, some cheap thing that could phone and text, but had black and white screen, could send 1 text, as in 180 character,s at a time so long texts would have to be sent seperately, leading to confusion, but everything worked...for a couple of months, when it would no longer recognise my SIM card. My sister was then getting a new phone on her contract, so I took her 2 year old phone, which I've had now for ~6 months. The bracket that holds the screen on is starting to come away, it finds signals when it wants, it will say the battery is low or turn itself off when the battery still has full charge.
My point is, I wanted cheap, I got cheap, I payed the price. I got told it will work just fine and I believed it, but it failed, rather than paying lots of small sums, if I'd have payed more upfront one time, I'd have had a decent unit. Listening to marketing of the phones, what the manufacturers say and what others have said, I got crap deals out of it.
Now of course, hard drives (generally) aren't prone to immediate or iminent failure, they will last a few years, but the quality of speed is much lower, the drives are slower than SSD's, even though you pay more.
I completely agree prices are too high for the general consumer now, but when SSD's are affordable, but still several times more expensive than hard drives, correct marketing will make people part with double the money for them, even if they lose capacity.
When you said that consumers need the space offered by hard drives, I could not disagree more. My parents use their computers as general users, they go on facebook, twitter, my mum stores photos, music and videos on her system, my step dad likes to go on motoring forums, they aren't gamers, they aren't programmers, they don't burn massive amounts of DVD's, they are your standard user. Of the 320GB drive in my mums computer, with ~5 years worth of photos on there, she has about 100GB of her 320GB drive used. My step dad has about 70GB of his used. Add my sister into the mix, with uni work, music, and light games (mainly the Sims) she has a whole 40GB used. The average consumer do not need the storage.
For the DVD thing, I didn't say Burays were out first, I said HD DVD came out at the wrong time, as did bluray in my opinion, they would have much more sucess bringing it out around a year ago than when they did. Relatively few people used HD or needed the extra storage, they had a tiny market.
Finally, I should point out, and it is deffinitely my fault, I have been mixing standard consumer/knowledgable user in my posts. Certain points are for those that understand upgrading or at least a little about components of a computer, and those that think a computer is a single object that can't be changed at all. I will expand on that later when I have more time to post, but I'm not on my system and have to finish my post here due to time