> if 29.95 is the regular price for the 4pole version
It isn't. I've paid $25 for a 2-pole 12-position switch, and 4-pole with more than 3 positions are not a standard item at any distributor.
All the standard switches today are "12 pin": 1-pole 12-throw, 2-pole 6-throw, 4-pole 3-throw, etc. RadioShack, Elma, everybody has those. There are about 3 low-price makers in the $2-$10 range, and high-price brands are stocked at industrial distributors like DigiKey and Newark.
It "should" be "easy" to stack several wafers on one shaft. But the $2 RadioShack is pressed together, can't be stacked. And nobody seems to want to carry long-shafts and stacking hardware. DigiKey has one line of stackable pieces: $23 per wafer and $35 for the shaft-bushing-detents. So to duplicate what TriodeEl is offering would cost over $130. If DigiKey even has the wafers in stock; they often don't have everything in the catalog.
What has happened is: today if you need more than Off-Warm-Hot 3-way switching, you are probably going to put a computer in the thing. That works very well for washers, toasters, crank-grinders, and most other modern toys. So the need for a simple passive switch with a lot of postions has vanished. We audio-heads don't want a computer mangling our audio, but our needs are far too small to keep a factory busy.
Triode El's $30 price was for the switch plus resistor boards. They ran out of boards so they are dumping the switch at $20. However if you tried to buy just one of that switch, anywhere else, you couldn't! It must have been a special order: either Triode El put up the $10,000 set-up costs for Alps to produce that switch, or Triode El found surplus from some failed product which had paid the special-order costs. So if you might ever use ANY kind of 23-way switch, I think you should buy it now.