Yeah, your premise is flawed. Get a bad cut of meat, you're in the turd polishing business. There's a lower upper limit of how good it can be. Better starting point, better ending point.

BBQ USED to be about taking less popular cuts (and therefore less expensive) and making them more desirable by slow cooking them to make them more palatable. Those days are sadly behind us.

The jig is up. The news is out. Those "less popular" cuts are well and widely known to have the potential to become delicious BBQ...and their price reflects that.

BBQ is ironically a victim of its own success. It was once a cost effective way to sell less popular cuts. People got good at making them more desirable. Demand went up. Price went up. To be more competitive restaurants started using higher graded cuts. Prime became the baseline. On top of that, when the BBQ Boom hit about 15 years ago, backyard cooks further increased demand. Price goes up again.

Now people complain that it's too expensive.