I think you are missing the point of Tekszis post a little bit here. He isn't saying that your prices are steep he is just saying that it's not an insignificant summ of money that he can just say "aw well unlucky" and forget about it when he has been waiting for a refund for so long.
Secondly the way the first wave of ticket sales was handled is agreed to be one of the biggest mismanagements of ticket alocation in the history of tf2 lans. So trying to say it was "not optimal" is a big understatement. There are a lot of people that are not going to go this lan because of this and if this was thought out correctly there could have been so many different ways of handling this, the biggest mistakes i see were as follows:
-not having ticket reservation for teams with a set number of them going to the top invite teams.
-having the 1st wave be not even 2 weeks after the LAN was announced to the community.
Seeing as how I've only ever attended LANs and never actually done anything to help organize one there are surely many other things that go into managing events like this that I am missing info on, that however is no excuse for sub par handling of peoples hard earned (for most) cash when they have paid you for a given service. For the future I suggest giving yourselves some more time to think things through before rushing into the decission making process so as to avoid situations of backlash such as this as I am sure you know there are many other examples not just Tekszi.
Cheers