What's ridiculous are you medical growers that live in a privileged location but completely fail to understand basic economics and how scarcity influences price.
Why is buying a clone for $50 ridiculed but buying a ten-pack of seeds for $100 is not? In both situations, the likely scenario is you end up with one good pheno. With the seeds, you lose time with germination, throw out almost half due to sexing, yet with one clone, I can have a viable mother plant in just a few weeks.
If you lived in a non-medical state without easy access to clones, tell me you wouldn't pay $50 for someone to ship you one? Tell me, short of buying a plane ticket and flying to a medical state, buy clones, and ship them back to yourself, how you would intend to grow your favorite strains? How much is too much to pay for good genetics?