I don't think 1TB of storage makes something professional equipment. I have well over 500 GB of photos. I want each of those stored locally where I control the data. Nor do I think 32 GB of RAM makes something professional. I'd prefer to future proof such a large purchase, and because I can't even go back to Apple in 3 years and purchase more RAM I have to decide right now what might be useful in 5-7 years.
You can always use portable drives, cloud, or a NAS to store photos. In either case you need a backup, storing everything on one laptop is a bit limiting.
I do use portable drives, Dropbox, and Amazon Glacier. I have four copies of my photos. They are, by leaps and bounds, my most irreplaceable data. I want every single one of them on my main machine, which makes automating backups to the external drives and Glacier infinitely easier. It is a dealbreaker for me, and I don't find $400 an acceptable price to pay to get past said dealbreaker. Well, realistically, $800, seeing as my personal Dropbox is at 850 GB, it would be silly of me to buy an un-upgradeable drive that would be teetering on storage space issues from the jump. Apple thinks it is reasonable to pay $199 less than it would cost for an entire second MacBook Air to upgrade drive space to 2TB.
That's absolutely professional levels that you are demanding both in storage and RAM.
Apple sells computers in the premium/professional market segment. They're not going to change that. If you're not making money from the equipment or if you can't afford it for consumer use, there's probably nothing that they will do for you, you're not in the intended customer segment.
Charging a 400+% markup for storage and RAM does not suddenly make a laptop professional. Sure, if there was a significant difference between screen size, chip, battery life, etc, you could argue the $999 one is a prosumer device and the $1799 laptop is a professional device. The only difference between a $999 laptop and a $1799 laptop is 768 GB of storage and 16 GB of RAM. I will even be generous and say that is a $700 difference because Apple tosses in two more GPU cores ($100) when you go over a certain amount of RAM. On Amazon, I can get a 1TB M.2 drive and 32 GB of DDR4 SODIMM RAM for $150 total. A premium from Apple on those components would be $300-$400. They are at $700-$800.
If you are buying professional work equipment, a difference of a few hundred dollars does not matter. Professionals in any field usually have equipment worth thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.
And if you're buying a computer as a consumer because it is a premium machine, well then you eat the price if you really want the machine, or you have to go for non-premium competitors.
You're comparing McDonalds to a nice steak in a good restaurant. The good restaurant will charge dearly for a bottle of water while McDonalds gives you free refills, and so on. The business models are different and the market segments are different.
Odd, every steakhouse I have been to gives me as much water as I'd like, free of charge.
I'm not comparing a hamburger from my local go-to to a steak from a steakhouse. I'm comparing the cost of the mash potatoes that comes with my hamburger ($5) and what they cost at a non-Apple steakhouse ($15). I don't go to the Apple steakhouse not because I find their steak unreasonably priced (it is a great value, actually), but because I refuse to pay $60 for mash potatoes, and if I don't get the mash potatoes, the steak has no value to me.
What I'm saying is that you're comparing apples to oranges.
A steak in a nice restaurant and its accessories will always be more expensive than a burger meal at McDonalds.
Apple has invested enormous effort into making high quality software. They offer the only operating system on the market which is any good at all. But their business model is selling hardware, so that's where they have to bake in all their costs. And their hardware is top notch as well. They could change their offerings to charge a high basic price on all their devices and then offer RAM and SSD upgrades for the low prices you are mentioning. But they choose instead to have a lower base price, knowing that the only people who need more RAM or storage (need, not want), are professionals who can pay for it.
It's the same in a nice restaurant. You're not paying for the ingredients, but everything around it including staff, the environment and so on. That's why a beer is so god damned expensive when you go out.
