I agree with pretty much everything you are saying.
And I would love to run conduit to every room in a house.. But trying to sell that as a feature to an assembly-line home builder who then has to try and sell it to a home owner, who then has to understand they still need to pay more to actually run cable through that conduit isn't going to happen.
In fact, you'd be lucky to get that to happen with the million dollar homes too. Those people pinch their pennies even harder than the $300K homes... which is probably how they became millionaires in the first place.
However, I've had some good success in getting people to spend $200 for a basement to attic conduit (builders price, not mine)
And usually when a home owner gets that, they have me come in afterwards and add wiring to their second floor that would have cost 3 times as much through the builder.
