Will fiber optics systems be cheaper in the future?
Lighting fiber optics is not a certain mass-market product and maybe will never be. Even today mainly systems are, at least in part, produced in small batches of some hundred units at most or hand crafted. Very few things are made in the thousands, along with the exception of injected parts that have a very low unit cost.
By a manufacturing point of view short series are extremely expensive to produce, because manufacturing are missing and the cost advantages of bulk purchase. Fiber optics groups or harnesses could simply be mass-produced with very significant savings that would reduce unit costs drastically. This problem is very seldom; harnesses are of similar size or have the same fiber composition. Therefore, they have to be hand tailored, almost one by one, those results on very high production costs.
The other reason for the high unit costs of systems is the technical backup which system manufacturers have to give. Nearly all of the installations have to be individually assessed, studied and estimated in house, due to the lack of widespread technical expertise elsewhere. It means that expensive technical departments have to be kept to facilitate know-how on an everyday basis.