[Crazy Jetty]

First off, this is not a Marvel Toys vs DC Toys thread, or a Hasbro vs Mattel thread. And it's not even about articulation.
It's about this:

In this time of rising costs, where 4" figures are now borderline $10, is there still a place in the world for the 6" market?

More and more collectors are starting to prefer collecting figures that are the same scale as Star Wars, and GI Joe, for various reasons (Including space and cost), and grow increasingly upset when a new 4" line does not meet their expectations.
This trend is quite frankly the reverse of what lead us to the 6" collector's market in the first place. In the eighties and early ninties, most toys were 3.3/4"-5". It wasn't until the market started drifting towards the collectors when marvel toys and Star Trek toys, and many others bumped up to 6" or more.
And by the 2000s, the smaller scale figures were almost never produced by anyone. Even transformers had shifted away from smaller basics, and made deluxes and voyagers their backbone (With a heavy helping of ultras and leaders).

But here and now, rising resource costs have made such large figures financially impractical for consumers, as well as collector desire for things that take up less space.

But, there are still a lot of companies that are collector orented, that have never produced a 3" figure (Thinking of Marvel Select, and DC Direct/Collectables, as well as others), and as a result, their figures continue to get more and more expensive, like their retail Mattel/Hasbro counterparts (DCUC and ML).

So, my question is this. As these figures continue to grow more unpopular for various reasons, is there still a market for them? Or have they gone the way of the dinosaur, and the companies just haven't realized it yet?

My personal feeling is basically... almost. I enjoy my DCUC collection greately, but the only reason I collect them anymore, is I don't feel there's really a viable alternative for them in the smaller scale. (While I don't feel DCIH deserves the trashing it continually gets, it never lived up to it's potential. And it's a dead line anyway, so that's not a viable alternative).
I think the smaller scale allows greater possibility for truer scale between characetrs, as well as opens up the potential for vehicles and playsets (Even if the potential is untapped).
A DCUC batmobile that could fit two figures would be unreasonably huge, and ungodly expensive.
if Mattel or DCD offered a decent 3.3/4" scaled line (Like those GL convention twopacks) that was practical to collect (Unlike those GL convention twopacks), I have to say I'd give up collecting the 6" DCUC line almost altogether.
What say you, fellow arkers?
Are the 6" figures dinosaurs and the 3.3/4" the new mammals? Or do the 6" lines still fill a niche?