As I mentioned before, it's all about how seriously you take coffee.  Some people say that paying more than $6 for a bottle of wine is excessive, while others relish fine wines and will pay a lot more.  What's "too expensive" for you might be a minimum someone wants to spent.  I constantly see people paying $10 per cup of Starbucks coffee.  For those of us who feel that's extravagant, we might spend $1.69 at a gas station.  If you take the cost of the coffee and break it down to how much you're paying per cup of coffee, it may be well worth it for some.

So, a pound of coffee at Papist Coffee costs about $25, and we know that a pound of coffee makes somewhere around 32 cups.  So you're paying about 78 cents per cup.  To many who appreciate coffee, it's well worth the cost, when you pay $1.69 for a cup of swill at a gas station or upwards of $6-$10 at places like Dunkin or Starbucks.  You can get cheap ground coffee for about 28 cents per cup, so you think of it as paying an extra 50 cents per cup, which is not much for someone who really enjoys coffee.

Now, if you drink coffee just as a way to ingest caffeine, sure, then this would be "too expensive" for you.  It's similar to how rednecks will get the cheapest swill "beer", for a few bucks a case, since all they're really after is the basic sense of beer and the alcohol.  I enjoy beer, so I'll pay $12 for a 6-pack of good beer any day vs. $6 for a 6-pack of Miller Light.  Similarly, some people are fine with spending $6 for a bottle of wine, but someone who enjoys better wines wouldn't consider that stuff and would easily spend $20 for a better quality wine.  Same things holds of coffee.

Yes, a lot people think good coffee is worth $25 a pound, just as a lot of people think that paying $20 for a bottle of wine is worth it vs. spending $6, or paying $12 for a 6-pack of craft beer is worth it compared to drinking Miller or Budweiser.  Only way to make it less expensive is precisely why the other stuff has turned to garbage, getting cheap ingredients, mass producing it, cutting corners, etc.

Right, and especially when you break it down to being about 50 cents extra per cup, when most people think they're getting a good deal paying $1 at a gas station for their swill.

I gladly spent $12 for a 6-pack of craft beer vs. $6 for a 6-pack of Budweiser.  When I was in college, I was never a "drinker", though I tried some beer once or twice and thought it was repulsive.  It wasn't until about 15 years later that one of my brothers gave me a real craft beer, and I was like, "Ah, so this is what beer ACTUALLY tastes like.  It's great."  People who drink the cheap beer are simply imbibing for the alcohol (i.e. mostly to get drunk).  People who don't care about coffee just imbibe it for the caffeine.  Sure, if that's all those things are to you, vehicles to consume alcohol and caffeine respectively, sure, just get the cheapest you can (absent considerations regarding your health).  But if you like beer and like coffee, you pay more.  It's similar to paying for more expensive cuts of meat.  Yeah, you can get the cheaper cuts for half or a third of the price for ground beef, but sometimes people pay more because they enjoy steak.  Both have similar nutritional content.