Remember, Morty was super-duper lucky as he was there at the very beginning for Buchla; it was him and Ramon Sender, plus a $500 Rockefeller Foundation grant to the SFTMC, that led to the original 'Buchla box' which is now at Mills. I kinda exclude him from that list, since if it wasn't for him, Ramon, and Don discussing the whats and hows of this 'electronically-controlled studio' (the original concept for the 'box'), the whole West Coast thing might not have happened.
Suzanne, also, is a bit different. Her initial Buchla system was pure 'sweat equity'...she worked for Don in the Berkeley factory, which apparently was quite a challenge in the day, stuffing boards and doing solder work, and that's how she 'bought' her 200 system. And again, this was a long time back...early 1970s, plus that Buchla of hers got used for a lot of scut-work to pay the bills. Things such as advertising work, odd session bits (such as Starland Vocal Band's "Afternoon Delight" and the discofied "Star Wars" album by MECO). I can respect that, too...doing ad-work sessions is pretty much the gold standard of 'no fun'.
But yeah...Buchla 200 series gear is pricey. A lot of that comes from the massive amount of control devices on the interface, things like banana and 3.5mm jacks, loads of knobs and buttons and so on. Those things are actually pretty costly, which is why you saw this jump to the awfulness of the 'display + slider' paradigm when digital control became the norm in polysynths circa 1983/4. I don't even want to think about how much all of the little sliders, buttons, controls, widgets etc cost on my Jupiter-6, for example, and I can see why Roland ran screaming from that into the slider/membrane panel/LED display era, only offering the actual programming controls (the PG-series boxes) as spendy 'extras'.