Yeah, I actually imagine SMT parts will make home etching more reasonable in the future. Drilling all those holes was such a drag conventionally. With pre-sensitized pcbs, all you have to do is print out your art on a transparency, slap it on the board, shine a bright light on it, develop and etch.
No, Oracle it was not a rant. Maybe a little flippant but whatever. Youre right I didnt acknowledge your comment about Olimex. Thing about them, is that its 24EUR for a ~6"x4" single sided panel with a maximum of 4 pieces per panel. That works out to almost 40USD or $1.6 per inch. Work that out in BatchPCB prices thats about $60, but you also get double side pcbs, double soldermask, and double sided silkscreen. Olimex is also pretty picky/limited about drill sizes where BatchPCB works with anything over 20mil diameter.
The $100 I "imagined" is for Gold Phoenix (ultimately the board house BatchPCB uses) which is more like $90 for 100sq in panel. This is double sided, double solder mask, and they route as many boards as you have for free. An extra $30 means you can have up to 6 different designs that they will panelize for you.
Anyway, the whole point of this was just to let the original poster know that fabricating nifty production quality boards wasnt entirely out of reach. That was all. And depending on the deployment, ie if there were multiples needed or this was some sort of commercial application, a pro level pcb might be worth the extra work (to learn Eagle) and expense. Okay, thats all I wanted to say.
Cheers,
Brian