Good shoes are expensive, but expensive shoes are not necessarily good.

Thanks to industrial processes, good shoes also have a maximum manufacturing cost. There are only so many features you can pack in to one footwrap designed to be worn on the surface of Earth. Springs, torsion bars, carbon fiber, pneumatic chambers, pockets, separated toes, non-Newtonian fluid insoles, flame resistance, arc reactor exhaust ports, or whatever. All of those things still cost less than the trademark logo.

You can avoid buying some bad shoes by filtering out those with low prices. You can avoid buying shoes with a bad price/quality ratio by filtering out those with high prices. You still need to carefully examine any that are left, because with shoes, quality influences price, but price has many complex factors and you cannot easily determine what fraction is due to the quality.

Nike has plenty over $200.

There doesn't seem to be a noticeable difference between their $80 and $240 shoes though.

>High quality running shoes seem to max out at ~150

Huh? That's not even remotely accurate. There are tons of Nikes and Adidas way beyond $200, and even more so for "collectible" sneakers, and way more so ($1000 easily) for quality leather shoes.

E.g:

https://www.adidas.com/us/originals-shoes?sort=price-high-to...

https://store.nike.com/us/en_us/pw/mens-shoes/7puZoi3?sortOr...

https://www.colehaan.com/mens-shoes?pmax=351.00&pmin=251.00

https://www.thefryecompany.com/mens/boots?product_list_order...

And I'm not including any high-fashion brands...

Dress shoes and hiking boots are often in that range. A good $200 pair of dress shoes or hiking boots should last many years, even with constant use, as long as you take care of them. You definitely don’t have to spend $300 but if you’re willing to spend $150 you have a lot of options available.

For sneakers I’m not convinced that spending $200 is worth it. For hiking boots I’m pretty skeptical of anything I see that’s under $200, or maybe $150 on sale.