This is more of a question for the mid-range scopes ($1k+) from the big scope manufacturers like Keysight, Tektronix and R&S: for a machine whose internal engineering are basically fully depreciated (Don't tell me that a 100MHz scope internals are complex to engineer even to a cost if the Chinese can pump them out for a fifth of the price) where is my 2-3k going? I'm looking at the scopes costing 3-4k and have poorer screens and user interfaces, particularly automated ones (SCPI is kind of terrible to program, but standardized I guess) than an android tablet I can buy for $100. Really.
Is it bad sourcing and manufacturing? I don't really expect Apple quality (well, if I was spending 100k+ I would) since no one is at that scale, but I do expect proper screens and proper capacitive touch -- a $2000 scope that gleefully advertises a 800x480 screen is shameful IMO, with aliased fonts and graphics straight out of 1996. A smartphone SoC < $20 at scale and includes a GPU! Give me some detailed plots and text that doesn't make my eyes bleed! The low end scopes could easily be implemented on a single chip + maybe an FPGA for some of the difficult stuff! (Hell, xilinx has a sheet touting how siglent did it with a Zynq)
Is it bad engineering? Well, the recent and excellent series of videos with the Keysight engineer tells me that there are still people who care about engineering--but few who seem to care about user experience, which incorporates more than just UI design. It's like they spend a ton of time on the internals and then give the one software dude (let's face it, it's probably all guys in there) an underpowered processor and 1k of RAM to handle what people actual interact with daily more than that super mega sweet niche signal analysis feature that's easier and better done on a computer offline.
I'm mad because despite being a hobbyist I'm lucky enough to be able to afford decent scopes, and yet I cannot get something that rivals cheap shit that gets pumped out of china daily.
Now I'm gonna get the folks who'll say: well suck it up, it's a tool, it's for pros. Well to them I say that's a false dichotomy. You can get tools that have care put in to more than just the spec sheet that are used by professionals daily: look at ThinkPads or Macbook Pros, or even stuff like the saleae logic series which is just nice to use and own and beats the pants off the logic analyzers included in most MSOs for sometimes less than the license cost!
I mean, look at the BenchVUE UI:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/t57461/ . It's not meaningfully better than the red pitaya UI and it's in many ways worse since it is quite expensive and still requires expensive hardware. Sure there are margins to protect and profits and such, but that's the kind of talk that gets you disrupted by someone without your legacy costbase and concerns. How do you expect newbies--who are coming in from places like the arduino community or "maker" community--who don't have big expense accounts and dedicated procurement teams -- to stump up the cash for a keysight or tek or r&s when the Chinese are offering more for less? The experimenter today is tomorrow's startup is the next big customer of yours.
The closest HW scope I see to actually having a decent experience is the RTB2000 series, which still does the whole nickel and dime for features that the Chinese will throw in for free, but that's probably due to the cartel like behavior in non-Chinese branded scopes.
I'm tilted here.