It's no time to panic.
The latest HW upgrades (FS clock and the new AKM chip) have had an impact on measurement technology, but not everything that can be measured will have a noticeable effect on the sound quality perceived by the ear.
In addition to the drop in price that you mention, it would have been interesting to know what price you are getting angry about.
I can well imagine that one or the other will be very annoyed when realizing later to have sold the product far below the usual used price.
RME devices are basically the exact opposite of what you are talking about, namely very stable in value. This is due to the fact that the internally built FPGAs do everything including the communication with the computer.
Because of this RME is able to fix everything (which is not pure HW) via firmware upgrades. And RME has been supporting some devices this way for almost 20 years with firmware, drivers and software upgrades.
That's why the devices are so stable in value, that even if you sell older devices, you are getting still good money for it.
If there are any crash prices now, it is certainly due to people who have not yet realized that RME devices are not consumer devices that lose their value much faster, because consumer devices have a much shorter product cycle of maybe 3-5 years, and usually not so much can be fixed by firmware upgrades.
BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub13