I've had a few issues with Azure myself, but that never caused me to question the pricetag.
Will not treating DO as a serious threat come back to bite them? Quite possibly. Are they worried about it right now? Seems not.
To match DO with AWS on bandwidth cost, you need to burn a few petabytes.
10tb on AWS? $1,200. Given how cheap bandwidth is these days, that's beyond outrageous. Amazon is charging for bandwidth roughly a hundred times what it costs them.
Now let's say you're actually heavy utilizing DO, so you've got one of their bigger plans and burn up plenty of bandwidth. Their $480 plan comes with 8tb, and the extra 2tb (to match 10tb on AWS), will cost you a mere $40. 16 cores, 48gb of ram, 10tb of bandwidth, for $520.
Of course it's understood people use AWS for reasons other than price.
Can DO's pipes handle a sustained load of whatever a 16core 48gb ram machine can handle without their pipe being the bottleneck?
If not maybe that is part of the reason AWS can charge so much for bandwidth.
I run a reliable Tor relay with a 12TB allocation for $7/mo, admittedly from a sketchy provider, of which I use almost the entire allocation. My main hosting provider (for my website, email, etc) sells shared gigabit bandwidth at $2.50/TB, half DO's price, which they apparently still make a profit on.
On top of that, DO is doing this on a much larger scale than many of these other companies, which should allow them to obtain better prices.
In other words, please elaborate and provide some facts!