Because they say they are selling it at cost, so they aren't making money on it. This means there isn't going to be money available to invest in pushing down the cost. To me it would seem more logical to let the market compete for the business.
Of course if nobody is interested in competing then it's a moot point. But as it runs Linux then there is a market outside of AmigaOS, if it can be made cheap enough. Which at the current price it isn't cheap enough.
This is the only choice left, try to sell an AmigaOne as cheap as possible in the hope that Amigans will buy software. I suppose that their Store is working well, so the more AmigaOne users the more they expect to sell software.
Software will be the driving force here not HW. They could also sell to 68k users being under emulation, Amiga or FPGA.
It is the best thing they can do IMO.
Kamelito