This kind of thing is one of the big reasons why reference architectures and paint-by-whitepaper are still popular methods of designing a system, despite the clearly superior options available from a price/performance standpoint.
It really does come down to TCO but the point is that there are many factors that contribute to 'cost' and these are very much dependent on the type of organisation and use.
No solution is a one-size fits all but most types of solution do market to a wide spectrum of needs, despite usually only being suitable to a much smaller subset.
Take blades. You can get cheap blade units and these are often marketed as being great for small companies. And hey can be, but the chassis/blade infrastructure means that 2 or three servers can be cheaper than the equivalent compute/storage provided by a blade. So why get one?
As Trevor has noted, one of the big benefits of a blade system is the management. But these advanced features only (generally) come with the higher priced units, which are out of the price range of many who might otherwise consider blades. But then, that extra price puts you up to other solutions.
Thus you find that most solutions find their best value in rather specific scenarios.
Unfortunately, it can be difficult to identify these and often you just don't understand the real TCO until you've actually tried a system. - as with Trevor. For him, he was trying to get great value for money - as we all should, but his time is probably the most valuable resource he has and he needs to get good value from that too!
Hyper-converged is good too but below a certain point, it is too expensive. The minimum configuration of 2 is not really cost-effective as a production environment but I am not sure you'd deploy an entire row of them!
Back to blades, however, it's very difficult to understand the value of the management software until you find yourself with a problem that it would have solved!