Meanwhile the cheapest external drive I can quickly find on Amazon is $35, just under half as much as I paid, or about a bit under a third for the same drive today. Either way it's far less than 10-20x.
From what I can tell, the affordable BD players cannot play all discs. They can read (and probably write) all data discs, but when I buy a disc, there's no guarantee I will be able to rip it and make it accessible over my LAN. That's the kind of drive I want, and that's what ends up getting scalped.
It only takes a little bit of research, and there are plenty that are not being scalped (or probably more commonly, scooped up by people who intend to use them). I found some in EU pricing in just a minute of searching. The MakeMKV forums are full of suggestions for suitable drives.
It's annoying if you have some more obscure blu-ray release that nobody else has ripped, and even more so if you don't know a guy who can do you a favour.
I can take a $120 gamble to just buy a USB BD-drive and hope the disc isn't DRM'ed enough to make it a problem, but I'd rather just be sure and grab a drive that can rip everything. Unfortunately, because we can't have anything nice, scalpers make these drives impossible to obtain.