Looking at their pricing ($500/user/year) seems pretty reasonable for such a high-impact role. If you're at a company, the question is if it saves you ~5 hours in a year.
It absolutely does. I know what life was like before Tableau (MS Excel + webquery, custom highcharts, cobbling together graphs from multiple SaaS services, custom python+R code) and I can say it probably saves 5 hours in a day or two.
Pricing isn't dependent on how much it helps you, but on how much more than competitors and alternatives. Otherwise food would cost an arm and a leg.
That is not a adequate comparison. You aren't done after you bought the software. You need someone to set it up as week and that cost scales with the quality of the software you bought. You need to look at the cost you have once everything is said and done.
Tableau Desktop Professional is $1,999, as the regular has a limited connectivity this is version to get for an enterprise user.