Also, the most interesting thing about Octopart is the line item that says how many parts are in stock, not the pricing.
I agree with your point about prices. Most people using Octopart, Digi-Key and Mouser aren't too concerned with pricing. Life would actually be easier for us if we hid Digi-Key's prices but we don't because we want to display all the information we have and because some of our users do find it useful.
It's the law of unintended consequences: by creating a directory of parts where the only organizational information is price, you indirectly encourage people to buy from the cheapest distributor. The cheapest distributor will tend to be the company with the deepest pockets, biggest warehouses, and crummiest customer service.
Let me give a real-world example: I've worked part-time for an internet service provider for a while. Our customers can call us up and (usually) reach a person right away. The tech support guys also happen to have sysadmin privileges, so if there's something wrong with their maildir, it can get fixed right away. We spend the rest of our remaining energy constantly working on new services and upgrading existing ones. So, we have decided to compete in the customer service and innovation arenas.
However, we can't compete on price. We've had several customers cancel service with us and move on to services like NetZero or PeoplePC. Sometimes we get a call back a few months later from the customer, all in a panic, because they can't get help with their computer anymore or the installware is behaving badly.
Nobody at the ISP is getting rich. We all work pretty hard to provide a service in the community. I think that given PG's definitions of "goodness", we'd mostly qualify.
Now let's say somebody comes up with a way to shop for internet service providers by going through a directory. The customer selects their region or city, and gets a list of possible internet service providers, along with the prices for service.
We'd stop getting phone calls from prospective customers, which costs us the opportunity to show prospective customers how easy we are to deal with. Customers would tend to buy the cheapest services, maybe without ever realizing that for just a couple dollars more a month they might have an option that's better for them.
We would be forced to either cut our prices, at the expense of our other services, or we'd be forced to scale back operations a lot (which would again cut into our ability to develop other services), or we'd go away altogether and customers really would lose an opportunity.
Without defending them, I can see that this might be where Digi-Key is coming from. If they're not interested in competing purely on price, they could see it as unfair to be forced to do so.
For your part, it sounded at the conference like your goal at first was just to make it easy to find parts. Then, you figured that having price information would be useful too. But, if your goal is to provide a "good" service for people, I don't think you can stop there. I think you're going to have to come up with a way to list customer service reputations for the various distributors, as well as their ability to have the parts on hand, ship them out quickly, handle returns or other problems, deal with hobbyists with smaller quantity orders, etc.