Knife buying is my one luxury hobby. I often times pine for the days when I had none.
I sometimes look at knife buying like this. Say a knife cost me $500. If I'm a pro with two weeks of vacation (I assume some cook somewhere gets this, although not in my limited experience), I might use it roughly 351 days of the year. That's $1.42 a day and then it's entirely "paid off." Not such a high price, less than a coffee. A home user might use that same knife only half the year, 182 days. That's still only $2.75 a day.
Either way, assuming you keep the knife longer than a year, the upfront cost doesn't actually work out to be a bad trade off in the end, especially when allowing for salvage/second hand sales value. At least, that's what I tell myself...I purposefully ignore the compounding effects in regards to buying multiple knives.