Yeh, it seems counter intuitive. When a pipemaker is starting out and taking three days to make a pipe, it goes for $150 or so, and then as he gets good enough to crank out a half dozen a day, the price goes up.
But, having been a part of the art community for decades, I will never understand why someone would want to hand-make more than one of any given design. You have the whole world of imagination and creativity at your command, and you make the same damn design dozens of times? At least in the jewelry world, and just about every type of craft, when someone is making many of the same design, they are farming it out or casting or using some sort of production method. A truly creative person would go crazy doing that.