Sure.
Let's look at some of the major pieces of furniture people have:
Tables, cabinets, chairs.
It's the same story with all of them.
Let's start with cabinets. A bit of cheating since most people don't consider it furniture, but worth talking about.
Most people want white or colored cabinets. The "natural wood" look is mostly out of style these days, due to mass over-production of red-oak cabinets (and thank god. they made them because red oak was the cheapest most available hardwood in the us for many many years)
Where it isn't, they want something that "looks" like cherry (or what they think cherry looks like), or mahogany but isn't.
People are more than happy to buy cabinets with thin veneers or laminated whatever on them. They have no concept of construction quality, etc. They don't care. People who do care are willing to pay, but even then, don't know what they are paying for.
Given that, what precisely supports the price differential of making "really good" for people who don't care and aren't willing to pay for it?
The answer is "nothing" :)
Thus, it's not cost effective to make cabinets out cherry, when coloring poplar reddish will do.
It's also usually not cost effective to use real wood for anything that is going to be topcoated a solid color.
But again, you have this issue that there is a high-end, and a low-end, and the middle end doesn't exist, really, it's just low-end stuff sold at a higher price. Because they can.
It's pretty much all mass produced, BTW.
Note: The last part to be automated is finishing, and as the cost of flat-line finishing machines comes down from 100k to 10k, the number of shops buying them goes up, as happened with regular CNC.
But even in finishes, people can't tell what they are paying for. In an ideal world, you want your cabinets done with a nice 2k post-catalyzed conversion varnish (US) or 2k urethane (europe). Or uv-cured stuff that is equivalent. They will be very highly scratch resistant, highly moisture and chemical resistant, etc.
Can a consumer tell? No. They will look identical at the start. Unless you rubbed acetone on them, you are unlikely to be able to tell if the finish is a post-cat or not from the finished product. You would have to place 3-4 years wear and tear on them, and see how scratched and stained they look.
So instead, a ton of non-factory cabinet makers still use pretty crappy finishes (pre-cat lacquers, etc) because they are cheap and fast. 2k stuff requires accurate mixing and has a pot-life. Good folks these days use cyclomix or equivalent, or uv cure, or something, to make up for this. But the main sales point is lack of callbacks, which is hard to quantify. This kind of quality is hard to sell. Nobody (well, not enough people) really look at their cabinets n years later and says "hey, i bet that guy didn't do a great finishing job", instead they say "gee, i guess i'm hard on cabinets".
Interestingly, plenty of commercial work will call you on this kind of thing happening. But consumers just suck it up.
That's cabinets. Let's say that's a special case for a second.
Tables.
Well, okay, so to start, people do buy mass produced really-good stuff already. IIRC, most of the furniture restoration hardware sells is mass-produced.
I've also seen really well-made mass-produced stuff at crate and barrel before (in fact, in one case, better than i could make it by far, and i've been woodworking for 20+ years)
But most people are not willing to pay for this stuff, and those who do, are willing to buy cheaply made stuff for higher prices.
Let's take http://www.crateandbarrel.com/dakota-77-dining-table/s517252
Top is solid wood, pretty simple and machined construction.
You could produce it really cheaply with machines (and i'm sure they do)
But people are willing to pay 1499, and if i make the same thing, with a veneer top and same glued-on live edge (IE not "really-good"), and sell it for half price, people will buy it.
So why would i make it "really good" for 799 when i can make it "really crappy" for 799 and people buy it?
and that's precisely what happens!
Chairs are the same.
In general, people care what things look like, not how they are made or what they are made of.
So most people aren't willing to pay for quality, even if you tried to educate them about what it looked like (if you have to educate your market that you are better, you are probably going to lose)
This makes it not cost-effective to try to optimize for quality.
Somebody will just out-sell you and out-profit you by making it crappily and selling it for 80% of the same price.
This is in fact, the history of the world here. The good stuff either got pushed to the high end, or out-sold/out-stripped by people making crappy stuff and selling it at the middle end, and then making super-crappy stuff and selling it at the low-end.
In any of these markets, there isn't room in the market for this linear-curve of quality vs pricing. If quality vs price was a 10 point scale, it'd look like this right now:
quality: 1-3
price: 1-6
quality: 4-9
price: 7-8
quality: 10
price: 9-10
As a result, quality 4-9 doesn't get done much, and it makes no sense to make quality 10 furniture and sell it at price 2.