The way I would look at it, price point is when you pick a target MSRP and work back from that dollar figure and see if you can do it for a cost that is profitable.

When you build a product and sell it for what you have to with the MSRP being down the list of importance in the design phase, then that's just the price.

S&W revolvers have a price and it is what it is. Certain accommodations have been made to make them less expensive to manufacture through the years, but there haven't been wholesale changes to keep the price down either (the biggest issue had nothing to do with cost or retail, the infernal, I mean internal lock). Then Ruger, Taurus, etc... use S&W prices as their price point when designing and building their revolvers.

A business case for the 3rd Gen guns obviously involves looking at the existing market (Sig P220 as an example) to get the price point and working back to see if they can be built at a low enough cost to be a profitable proposition. So far they have decided they can't. Could be they view the Sig as too expensive and the target MSRP for a potential 3rd gen re-issue needs to be significantly cheaper.

Going back to my first post in this thread, I think that if S&W did a re-issue of a few models, like the 4506 and 1006, they could sell enough to make a decent profit per unit, but I doubt the case is there for anything close to the full lineup we had 20 years ago.