If you buy the materials for very low cost from your miners at the place where they mine and react at the location, your end product prices are a lot lower than what someone can achieve who buys moon minerals from the market and reacts elsewhere.
True, the point is that the price of the moon goo just goes higher and higher, and the price of the reactions didn’t follow that increase of value yet.
Then it would be still better to ship your goo to Jita instead of reaction. I’m not sure about the details, but the T2 market is fully controlled by the Goons. Maybe they just dump surplus reaction products to keep competition out, and embargo moon goo. Jita market does not tell us the truth about reaction business.
I made ~10B with reactions the weeks after the change but stopped when the prices “reversed” and sit on a stockpile of goo …
Shipping your moon goo to jita when you have a buyer directly in Delve or Deklein or Esoteria? Do you know how much fuel and effort it costs to move a JF from the first and last regions to Jita? Scrub miners don’t do that. Scrup EVE users want convenience and “help your buddies in your alliance”. You make more mining ISK by just keeping to mine instead of wasting time to move goo to Jita.
We all know that some people consider the ore they mine as free and you won’t made them change their mind… Add to this, that not everybody use spredsheets, not everybody takes industry seriously….
This is just a game and some people mine, make reactions, build T2 just for fun…. They won’t care about the prices they sell or if they make a profit or a loss….
People often say that the EVE Economy is just like the real world Economy. That is false… In Eve, you can mine Arkonor 10 hours a day, sell it for 5 isk a piece and if you Don’t lose your ship, you will still be richer tomorrow than you were today… you will never bankrupt as there are many ways to make ISK and it is easy. It doesn’t work in the real world but it is possible in Eve…
So It’s up to you to find the trends that make profit earlier than others and when the market is saturated because they are too many offers or because people sells at a too low prices, you have to switch to Something else…. It will be easier and quicker than educate people or change their minds…