For that price, I can buy 10 pairs of jeans on ebay, in a style that I like. Or I can go to the thrift store and get 50. I'll have wet ankles when I bike in the rain in a poncho, but whatever.
It's probably a personal preference type of thing. I don't like the feeling of having ten pairs of pants. I have this romantic notion that twenty years from now, I'm still be wearing the same $200 pair of pants (aged to perfection like a Barbour jacket), as opposed to a rotation of ten disposable pairs of pants.
I also happen to have two T shirts, one of which I wear for weeks in a row. It's merino wool. In the summer I switch to the other one for exercise, and that just gets handwashed when I'm done.
I realized that I'm gushing so hard about these pants, but I've been in search of the perfect pair of pants for the past five years and these are almost perfect.
Is that OCD? Wanting that one perfect thing that you can keep forever? Not sure, but I can't have it any other way.
Obviously one can also make that same argument for electric cars like the tesla, or SSDs when they were first released. The intel X18-M 80GB SSD was $700 when it was first released in 2008. New tech always starts out with low demand and high price.
For hackers, pants are not so incredibly useful. However, I'm guessing this company is not targeting computer professionals as their target market. If you're doing long distance cycling or you're a backpack/hiking kind of person, I'm sure odor/water resistant pants would be highly useful.
