It may seem to be that Butterfly are annoying their customers, unless you realize that their customers are the wholesale establishments that have virtual monopolies in their own countries. These distributors are required to keep the prices at a certain level, and can make as much profit from Butterfly as they want, because they have no competition with the same product at a lower price. They love Butterfly.
This used to be called Retail Price Maintenance in the UK, and was illegal until the 1960s. I worked in the hi fi business, which went crazy when RPM was removed, leading to the advent of massive discounts on products. The companies who managed to circumvent it, by cleverly and quietly restricting their dealerships to those who, under threat of sanctions, promised not to discount, managed to maintain their high prices and profits. As a result, a network of "respected" dealers (because they had the perceived high quality product), constantly extolled the "exceptional virtues" of those brands. You see how this becomes a circular effect. For everyone else, it was a race to the bottom.
It works in table tennis because the demand for the BTY name is high, largely because they sponsor the largest number of professional players, and make rubbers available to non-sponsored players at very advantageous rates. People talk a lot about what professionals use, but that is not where the money is made. I'm sure that someone on the forum knows how the CNT players come by Tenergy for their BH (those that use it), and I bet it isn't by going out and buying it themselves. If Jo "Local Pro" Public sees that the majority of top international players use Tenergy, he will be swayed, and to some extent pressured by peers, to use it too.
Paul Drinkhall said in the review on this site that he found MX-P was different to Tenergy, but that he can play just as well with either. I suspect this would be true of most players of that calibre.
