The vast majority of the general public either can't afford to or won't put down that money.
I believe the case to be far more the latter than the former.
The typical lighting fixture is a thoroughly simple and inexpensive piece of equipment that the average person is well-equipped to replace if they could be bothered. A ladder, a screwdriver, and perhaps
a flashlight is all that it really takes to replace most ceiling-mount light fixtures - wires are pretty universally pre-stripped and the wire nuts used to terminate previous fixtures can be re-used.
A well-designed, purpose-built, inexpensive residential LED fixture won't drop into an Edison socket in 5 minutes but doesn't require summoning an electrician either. It shouldn't be any more complicated than swapping out any other fixture - a 15-30 minute job at most - but inconvenience and fear of electrocution puts it into the "hire someone" category for many.
When most people shop with the lowest common denominator being cost, spending extra dough
up front isn't going to happen.
Eh, the average buyer seemingly doesn't
think they can afford anything other than a $0.50 incandescent because they don't understand the Total Cost of Ownership concept that CFL and LED bulb manufacturers have been unsuccessfully trying to convey for decades now. The purchase price of a $0.50 incandescent is typically less than 10% of its total cost of ownership, but that price is apparent to the average buyer while the de-coupled operating cost is all but invisible in an electrical bill seen at a later time that aggregates all consumption into a single number. One of my co-workers swapped all his incandescent lights for CFL
in the summer and expected his next months' electrical bill to drop significantly ... which it didn't ... which disappointed him ... then he admitted he was on an annual average billing plan and maybe he shouldn't have been expecting a change.
Our perspective is very different from that of the general public, who has never given a second thought to the 2D plastic flashlight in the kitchen drawer next to the rubber bands and twisty ties.
Indeed - something often lost on the average CPF member when they start a thread along the lines of
You wouldn't believe the types of flashlights I just saw [people] using for [purpose/event]!.