You're right about most of the "pass the savings on to you" brands that simply import Chinese sticks with lower quality control and no fancy marketing or branding - they're a dime a dozen, and while some offer a decent product (I've heard good things about ABHS), most aren't worth your time or money.
However, the idea that marketing and NHL fees savings would be passed on to customers has some validity to it. It's one of the reasons why BASE can offer its top-of-the-line ~400g custom stick at $240 with no minimum order. I asked Ron Kunisaki about NHL players using BASE (there have been a couple, including Dan Hamhuis and Alexei Kovalev most notably). He told me that he didn't want to pander to pros at the expense of BASE's regular customers. When Dan Hamhuis wanted to try BASE sticks, Ron refused to send him twigs unless he went through the same fitting process that regular customers go through to determine their optimal specs. He did it, and his stick specs did change. He ended up using a regular blacked-out Nasty in a stock BC92 Lie 5 curve. The downside of this philosophy is that BASE doesn't have any NHL pros using its sticks today, and even when Hamhuis and others were using them, they were blacked out. However, we're able to sell a top-quality product at a price that other manufacturers just can't match due in part to their expenses relating to marketing, NHL branding fees, and pro endorsement contracts. I'd put our Reign LT in a blind test against any stick on the market today, and aside from subjective player preference (which is very important), I'm convinced testers would hold it at the same level as $300+ sticks. Of course though, BASE isn't just blindly shipping in no-name sticks from China, since we have manufacturing and technical expertise from Innovative and the early Warrior 'golden days', and we own our own factory.
In that light, I have to give props to Sher-Wood for dropping its NHL branding and player endorsements to focus on grassroots hockey. They make a solid product at a very reasonable price, and if more manufacturers did that, players would have an even greater choice of quality equipment. Instead, you have the "big boys" like Bauer rolling out 'retail custom' sticks at $350 a pop, minimum 2, with less customization options than we offer.