My two cents on mission costs
Better a cheap mission with a fifty-fifty chance of success, than an expensive one that gets shelved and never flies at all because it can't get funded (essentially equivalent to a 100 percent chance of failure).
I get the impression that a lot of these missions are making use of all the money they could manage to get, and doing the best they can with it.
I, for one, am enthusiastically standing at the sidelines waving my team flag for every one of them. And I'm sure I'm not the only one here doing so.