Shipping costs... 
$56 bucks in a year ! That's a bit much.
As noted in another thread around here, a 40' container has gone from $4500 shipping cost to $45,000 in less than a year. A 10x increase. Figure out how that affects costs of items imported from China. You can fit a lot of N Scale product in a 40' so maybe BLI uses a 20' but I'm sure the costs for those has gone up about the same.
But it's not BLI that raised the prices. I just look on the BLI site The previous run of
Paragon 3 Mikes was MSRP $359.99. The new run of
Paragon 4 Mikes are MSRP $369.99 an increase of $10. Pretty reasonable considering the improvement in decoder and the other price increases over the time.
Also, where did you buy the first ones and are you looking at the same source for the latest?