I know, I know - They rented a hotel ballroom and give you lunch and snacks. It's too bad the self-organizing bar-camp thing kind of died when the great recession ended. I thought it might kill expensive conferences like Craigslist killed newspaper classifieds.
Please don't forget we have a relatively high ticket price a finite number of places and very significant fixed and variable costs. This is not a software business.
We also try hard to incentivize early booking and offer discounts to encourage this so the average ticket price is significantly lower than $2,500. (Tickets cost $1,800 at the moment and we have sold almost 3/4 of them.
We can be shocked and complain about the price, or we can say, hmm, maybe there's something to this "provide demonstrably great value and charge an appropriate price for it" idea... ;)