It seems to me that most of that extra work takes a long time to describe, but very little to accomplish. A lot of it overlaps with what either designers, or the sales team, are doing already. However, I can see we could argue that point indefinitely - it's hard to express it in monetary terms.

But do you not think running production depts costs serious money? There might be about five or more full-time salaries to cover, an office to maintain (equipment, rent, utilities etc). Then there is the amount of time editors have to spend having meetings with the production dept - in my days as an editor at Macmillan we used to have a production meeting every week, which involved all the editors, and which lasted most of the afternoon. That's very labour intensive. From talking to editors today, I don't think things have changed there much.