It wasn't the subbing itself that was expensive, it was the physical production and distribution costs. They sold a whole lot fewer subs than dubs, so they had to markup the price to justify a production run.
The original sub VHS tapes had an extra episode compared to the dub, that's where the value was from. I remember heavily pining for those tapes back in the day and I almost bought at few and that was the selling point that nearly pushed me over the edge for the sub. (I think it was 2 episodes versus 3, which was a HUGE value proposition)
I think it's wildly agreed that the point when Sarah stopped doing the dub was when the show went off a cliff. It sure got me to stop watching.
I have watched it all, but yeah original Ranma voice was definitely superior. It was the 'perfect storm' of extended lul, change in VA, and a notable drop in animation quality itself (which I'll get into in more depth when the time comes), etc that a lot of people gave up on. I didn't hate Richard Cox, I just don't think he worked as a mid-series replacement... just way too different of a voice.
That's interesting. As I recall, at the time the script adapter got a fair amount of grief for not providing a fully literal translation of the Japanese lyrics.
Trans-literalists are dumb. Unless you're working on a legal document, it's the absolute worst way to handle a translation that a living, breathing, human is going to take in. I was subbing anime in early 00's and I had quite a few disagreements with our editing team over stuff like that.
I'd argue the best part of the song translations is that you could just sing them along with the music and it'd match up. It means that English speakers could in fact sing along even if they didn't know any Japanese and thus experience the whole package (versus having background music to read random sentences to)
