Well I browsed a bit through their forums and it seems the LE community recently is "not amused" being faced with those prices. It also seems that in terms of the PC version of the engine the new one is a step backwards from LE2 for whatever reasons that is (seems he had to rewrite tons of code to make it compatible to Android etc.). This list of negatives of LE3 really made me scratch my head when thinking about the pricing:

• Currently a vastly more primitive renderer compared to LE2 or any other engines at the asking price, so no deferred rendering and no shader support
• No support for real time shadowing
• No support for terrain at all let alone streaming terrain
• No support for a vegetation system
• No inherent GUI support
• No built in networking support
• Limited physics support as I understand it (no joints for instance)
• Reliance on flow graph building of scripted objects leaves you dependent on the provision and quality of such objects if you are unable to write them yourself which can seriously limit your game design options
• No inherent plugin support to enable communities and third parties to add and embed functionality into the editor
• Virtually no additional game development toolsets
• A price which is comparable with a fully fledged engine with most of the above features
• No given time scales as to when further functionality will be introduced (as yet)
• No given promises that this will not incur additional cost (as yet)

Well it will be interesting to see how this turns out but I think the developer really went way too far when thinking about the pricing. Especially as he's going to wipe away all the hobbyists who might spend several hundred dollars but not 1000+. I also understand that several users are quite shocked as even when paying for LE3 they still cannot be sure that they won't have to pay again in order to get real time shadows or advanced shader support (because if that's not finished in the one year of free patches one gets then one has to buy the following patches and spend money yet again)...

So from that perspective I'm now even more sceptical about LE3. Even if he cuts the pricing in half or more the featureset still is pretty sad. Some flowcharts and a nice asset browser really don't make up for this...