Agreed. The entry point for SFX is still quite high, imo, because there are no “decent” cheap PSUs. Pretty much everything below ~70€ is garbage; It's almost an "all or nothing" situation: if you want to hook up a graphic card that requires some sort of auxiliary power that’s basically your starting point, and from there on 90% of the little more -than half-a-dozen SFX PSUs that exist are over 80-90€…
Yes, in isolation, if you compare for example one of the 600w SFX (either the Silverstone of the Corsair) with something similar in ATX (i.e. a 600w, 80-plus gold, fully modular, top-brand PSU) the price is very similar… but the reality is that most people do not buy fully modular, highly efficient top-brand PSUs: they buy crappy cheap PSUs. I’ve been building PCs and doing maintenance and fixes for friends, family, coworkers, etc. for 20 years now and I could probably count with my hands the number of times I’ve seen people actually use good PSUs. The vast majority of the time the buy the cheapest thing they can find that will allow them to run the hardware they’re going to put together. And you can do that with ATX because you can find 500-650w PSUs at 45-55€ that will give you 35-50A on a single 12v rail which is usually more than enough to run CPU+GPU+whatever (especially with the newer and more efficient components we’re seeing every day). Yes, most of the time they won’t be great PSUs and may run hot, or be noisy or whatever but at least they work, which is something you can’t do (for now at least) with SFX because cheap SFX PSUs are usually in the realm of “look, I have 500w!! isn't it amazing for this price??… but please, PLEASE, don’t ask for more than 20-25A” (btw, I toasted one of these a few days ago. In half an hour… it was both sad and hilarious at the same time)
So yeah, I’d love to see cheaper and capable SFX PSUs, I think that’s what would really make the format take off. As for SFX-L I don’t see it as much as an alternative to SFX as I see it as the perfect substitute for ATX. ATX in my opinion is obsolete by now with these new >700w SFX-L PSUs and should be relegated to extreme cases where you somehow need one of those meter-long over one kilowatt PSUs for whatever reason (probably because of your sata-powered nuclear reactor I suppose).
