Speaking as someone who bought a FLIR camera _because_ that hack made reasonable features available at a reasonable price, I think it's important to consider the market effect that such a hack, if properly managed, can have.
Corporations aren't gonna buy a camera and hack it. If a professional thermographer is telling her customers that she's using an E8, the bezel had better say E8 on it. But today's hobbyists may be tomorrow's corporations (My employer bought a C2 after I got sick of bringing in my E4/8), and brand recognition and experience have value.
And as has been said, if they have more of the high-spec units than they're selling (or the low-spec ones were a way to use up crap-binned sensors but might get good sensors too), then selling "the same" hardware cheaper might make good market sense. As long as they're not losing money on it...
I do wonder if someone might've wink-wink-nudge-nudge hinted that these units can do more than they're specced, Mike, you should tear one down... and then sales of that unit went absolutely through the roof. I know tons of people who have one now, and not a single one of us would've paid the E8 MSRP for it, and maybe only two of us would've found the E4 crap resolution useful.
Rigol took a different tack, and started simply giving away the decoders that everyone was hacking them to enable anyway.