Is LEGO worth its price?

In the recent past I heard a lot about how expensive LEGO is for the amount of bricks they deliver per set. That kept me thinking, why LEGO has these enormous prices.

When LEGO invented their clamping blocks, they first had a monopoly for the next decades, because they patented it. In this way LEGO could just say what an acceptable price for a set is.

But now with the competition on the rise you could see for the first time how low he production costs for these sets must be. There were always some LEGO copycats, but recently the competitions quality level rose so much while LEGO's started dropping, many people considered these sets for the first time.

When you buy a clamping block set, you don't just pay for the making of the bricks, but also the time a designer develops the set.

With this in mind I think, the competition showed that LEGO is not worth its price. LEGO has to work hard, so they will eventually loose their stigma of the money greedy company they seem to be. The only circumstance I can think of in which you buy a LEGO set is when you want the figures or it is an licensed product from Disney/Marvel etc.