Basically there's a cost in involved in setting up to do this, and "ridiculous sum" may or may not be involved. The smallest useable stem-turning lathe is probably the Taig mini, but it is real small and still a few hundred bucks to get into - even if you get a lathe for free you need some tooling, and you need to be able to buy or build some way to spin a pre made stem or rod stock. So there's a few hundred bucks to get this moving.
If you want to be able to make pipes en toto, you need a bigger lather, bigger chucks etc, to the tune of 1000 bucks or so, or a lot more.
I have a 10x27 metal lathe and a Jet Mini (6x14 I think) and those are both great. But between them, there's 4,000 bucks worth of lathes and chucks and tooling sitting there...