Prices will never come down to previous gen card prices. We’ve passed the threshold. NVidia will keep their prices high because there is significant demand for their chips outside of gaming and AMD follows in lockstep.
This is probably true, but it doesn't mean that individual, non-AI/crypto consumers have to accept it, and largely, they haven't been. All it takes is for Nvidia/AMD stock to drop from the overinflated prices for prices to come down.
And the stock dip is unlikely since they're doing gangbusters on the datacenter front.
Nvidia has enough gas in the tank to weather the hit from low consumer Gaming sales.
NVIDIA has been struggling in recent years to find use cases for their graphics cards. That's why they're pushing towards raytracing, because rasterization has hit its limit and people no longer need to upgrade their GPU for that (they tried pushing towards 8k resolution, but that's complete BS for screens outside of cinemas). However, most people don't care about having better reflections and indirect lighting in their games, so they're struggling to get anywhere in the gaming market. Now NVIDIA is moving into other markets for their cards that don't involve gamers, and they're just left as an afterthought.
I don't think that this will ever change again. Games like DOTA, Fortnite and Minecraft are hugely popular, and they don't need raytracing at all.
I personally tried going towards fluid simulations for games, because those also need a ton of GPU resources if calculated at runtime (that was the topic of my Master's thesis). However, there have barely been any games featuring dynamic water. It's apparently not interesting enough to design games around.
Just remember you get Starfield for free so it's kind of like a $70 dollar savings. I personally wanted the card plus the game so it really works out as a win win. I think $430 for the 7800 XT sounds reasonable for, someo who hasn't upgraded since 2016 and currently has a rx480. It might be a midrange card but I honestly don't know what more I could ask for if it runs everything max at 1440 and most thinks 4k are 60fps or over.