I empathize with you Jeff, but the holdback would be who, or by what system, are (fair) prices established? No doubt, $75/hour is a good median shop rate, but how much can you do in that hour?
Would you be willing to disqualify yourself because you don't have the perfect equipment to do a particular job? This is what the flat rate mechanics tell me, that unless you have every special factory tool, and the car was assembled only last week with antiseize on every bolt, will you meet flat rate times
Their solution, bump up the shop rate until flat rate works out to be a livable wage, for that shop equipped with the tools that it has. Other shops will have a different shop rate, but they all look at the same flat rate book, so the customer may not be paying exactly the same price everywhere, anyway.
I've gone searching a time or two for custom made tubing. From maybe a dozen different shops, all claiming that 'tubing is their business', the difference in price for the same part has a range where the higher bidder is 4 times what the lower bidder was. I have no clue how hard it is to fabricate custom tubing, so I don't know what the 'correct price' should be. I try the lowest first, to see what I get. Turns out it was fine, even excellent, so I couldn't ask for more from another supplier, nor would I be willing to pay 4x as much.
An economy is an incredible thing when you stop to think about how it checks and balances itself. Tough though it may be to swallow, I think it is necessary to force customers to shop around, because otherwise, a 'guaranteed comfortable rate' for machined goods will kill the drive for improvement within the shops themselves.
If you've ever gone fishing, sometimes it doesn't matter what kind of bait you use, the fish just won't bite. If we shop owners were all guaranteed a fair return per part, we just might have no customers willing to bite at those prices.