I've always assumed that perks overload the viewer from a usability perspective. If your goal is to sell bleeding edge phones and you hide that ability with a load of miscellaneous merchandise, then you might end up losing those high value purchases.
You're completely right - to me the phone is worth $600-650 because that's what I could have bought it for early on.
There's no way they'll get me to shell out +$200 now. The reward system feels like penalising those who back late, rather than rewarding those who back early.
