awap:
While I'm sure a tech could easily spend that much and more, the DIYer can do the job for a lot less, especially if you are already doing your cars and such. $8 is a very good price but we are talking something that should take less than 15 minutes and no disassembly required unless IP (on some designs) or cracking pressure needs to be adjusted. LDS tweeking of a reg is a nice service but clearly in the same category as dealer prep on a car. They should come from the factory ready to dive unless you receive one with a defect. May occur, but very infrequently.
I'm a DIY kind of guy, though I try to temper that approach with a little hard-nosed accounting. If you're going to work on your own regulator, there are some tools that you must have, some tools that you should have and some tools that you can do without. Serious DIY types will find many of these tools already on their bench but some of them are so arcane that you will almost certainly have to buy or fabricate them. You may have been able to limit your expenses to work on your regulators to $100 or so but only because you already had several tools and parts and were willing to invest quite a bit of time in manufacturing what you were missing. Spending $100 and tens of hours building tools and learning how to get the job done instead of spending $75 to have the work done by someone who is (presumably) trained only seems like a good idea if you're a hard-core DIY type.
$8 for 15 minutes of work comes out to $32 per hour - not a bad living and most dive shop monkeys would kill for that kind of a paycheck. Then again, although the bench time shouldn't be any more than 15 minutes (unless there is a serious problem) that $8 has to pay for somebody to process the paperwork, for the building and lights and cash registers, for the tools and that little bottle of Christo-Lube, etc. Around Chicago, if the tech ends up keeping $2 or $3 of that $8, he's doing pretty good. I'm not comfortable with the idea of the guy that works on my regulator barely makes $20G per year - who would take that job?
I agree that buyers shouldn't be paying for dealer prep - unless you didn't buy the car (or the regulator) from the dealer that you want to provide the service. The regulator was cheap, at least in part, because the dealer it was purchased from didn't do the work. That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be done, nor does it mean that a competing dealer should do the work for free. As to the frequency that a new regulator needs some tweaking, "very infrequently" is a subjective term. I think it's nearly 10% of new regulators, based upon my experience. Whether or not that constitutes "frequently" or "very infrequently" I suspect is determined by whether or not your regulator is one of the one-in-ten that needs work.
Small container (1/4 oz) of O2 compatible lube should run about $10. You don't need the whole tube or syringe for the occasional o-ring replacement.
To the best of my knowledge, Christo-Lube only comes in 1 pound, 4 ounce and 2 ounce containers. Whether you're buying the 111 or the 129, I've never seen it in 1/2 oz packs nor have I ever seen it at anywhere near $10. There are other O2 compatible lubes out there but, to the best of my knowledge, the only one universally recognized as acceptable by the manufacturers is Christo-Lube. Tell us who is selling 1/2 oz of Christo-Lube for $10 and a lot of folks will beat a trail to their door.
Paying more doesn't necessarily mean you get more. Especially with Scuba.
True enough but paying less almost always means your regulator comes with a "some assembly required" note and no warranty. I've got over a dozen regulators and have purchased most of them from back-channel sources - so I'm not opposed to the idea. The old rule of thumb about faster/better/cheaper is that you can't have more than two of the three. In the long-run, working on your own gear is usually faster and can be better but it's almost never cheaper if you count all the costs associated with doing it yourself.
p.s. The Peterbuilt pick set is...less than optimal. They're too big and too stiff. As long as you're a DIY kind of guy, the next time you're at the dentist, ask him if he has any retired picks that he'd like to get rid of. Find the softest, most slender and most convoluted pick and buy it from him, then take a dremel to the point and round it off. You may have to experiment a couple of times but I think you'll find the end result is far more sensitive and less likely to scratch any of the surfaces.
