Buying them at inflated prices from Intel rewards Intel for being able to make these at all. If they were able to make more of them, they'd be rewarded more.
Paying the inflated prices to scalpers would reward scalpers for hogging the supply. That would be far worse. If I'm going to pay an inflated price for something, I'd rather use it to reward the person making it than some speculator trying to wrench some profit out of a tight market.
> Buying it at inflated prices from Intel effectively rewards them for their inability to produce more.
For this assertion to make any sense you'd need to believe that they don't benefit by increasing sales of a product line, particularly when they increase prices.
Hardly, since the "rejects" will just be sold as the regular model(s).
In the old "lottery" system the rejects would end up on the secondary market, making Intel's final revenue effectively the same as if extreme overclocking wasn't a thing.
Paying the inflated prices to scalpers would reward scalpers for hogging the supply. That would be far worse. If I'm going to pay an inflated price for something, I'd rather use it to reward the person making it than some speculator trying to wrench some profit out of a tight market.