[Kylotan]

People who live in prosperous Western countries, like yours and mine, often follow the thinking that markets are self-correcting and everything finds its natural level. What they miss out on is that it's actually easy for these systems to spiral out of control and for the population to be unable to afford anything. Ask people in rural Russia or Zimbabwe, for example. Hyper-inflation is a big problem in the real world, and it could be in your world. Depending on the cash available to newbies, the price for the items they'd want to buy might have to be so low that no player with the relevant crafting skill finds it worth their time making them. Eventually scarcity will drive the price up, players will start to craft them, and a few newbies will be able to afford to buy them. The market has found its balance, but the market cares little for whether you've lost 90% of your new players who can't afford to buy what they need.

But you can't model that at all with the existing system. The prices are artificial, supply may well be infinite, so demand is likely to be fairly meaningless. Even if you could determine an average price for a potion that balances utility against cost, that's not necessarily the price that suits your game. Utility and cost of an item both change as the player gets more powerful, so that's 2 more dimensions to balance. The average good price might still be far, far out of the range for 98% of players, ok for the 1% with gold levels around the mean average, and actually be so cheap to the last 1% that they could easily buy the lot and trigger further price rises.

Free markets reach a point of equilibrium, but that equilibrium is not guaranteed or likely to be something that most people enjoy. In the real world, you can just say "that's life", if that's your political leaning. In a game, you're merely shooting yourself in the foot in the name of realism.