Earlier quoted context omitted.
First I would like to show the fallacy of your reasoning: we're discussing the unreasonableness of the current price of APCs for open access publications, and you are justifying its reasonableness by giving the current prices. Now I think you are thinking about this the wrong way. Nobody is denying that publication has a cost. But take all the money that universities around the world spend in subscriptions, add all t…
I agree with you that incumbent commercial publishers are sucking up a lot of money that could be better spent elsewhere. Where I disagree is on the specific numbers. It's not about the publishing platform or physical printing but the administration of journal's operations. The editorial board and the referees work for "free" (which actually means paid for by someone else, usually universities), but the management an…
Of course neither me nor my lab could afford that so I just went with the regular way, signed their fucking copyright release form while cursing a lot against them, and in the end didn't really care because in my field (cryptology), most of the papers are on the IACR ePrint Archive even before they are published (including mine) and they are updated there when they change.
So, my personal experience and my research on the subject (I have done a lot of work on open access, see http://pablo.rauzy.name/openaccess/introduction.html which is only available in French for now) say that no, the publishers work is most of the time not that important: for instance in my case if the conference or journal just published a list of links to the accepted versions of the paper on the IACR ePrint archive, the cost of publishing would decrease drastically and the quality of the publication would not change at all.