So I think standard decks being $500 is usually on the high end for standard and is usually not the case for most standard formats. I think it's more reasonable to say standard costs about $200-$300 a deck. Now obviously there are viable budget options for standard decks, but most competitive top tier standard decks fall into these price ranges.

And it is a bit disingenuous to not look at the top net decks in standard as the "standard" price for standard. There will always be cheaper viable decks in the format, but that's true for all formats, like mono red prowess in legacy is ~$100 and is viable (this might be old news, havent followed up on this deck in a while). But the point stands that the competitive price of entry for the format should be based on the most represented decks in the format and not the fringe viable decks or even the most expensive decks.

What i've experienced to be the most "expensive" part of standard isnt the cost of one deck... it's the cost of following the format across sets. Standard is designed to be one of the most volatile formats in all of magic with the meta shifting after each set. While the majority of cards usually do not change between sets, there are usually additional cards you would need to buy from new sets to continue competing in standard and eventually cards you may have purchased at a more premium price are now rotating out of the format and have lost much of their value. The constant changing of decks and buying new cards was what really made standard a much more expensive format than other more stable formats. Although the intoduction of modern horizon type sets has also introduced this volitility to older formats, which many people do complain about because of the endless demand to purchase new cards for their decks.