With regard to historical pricing, I agree. I suspect that's more an admin oversight than the lack of a system though. But in terms of the equivalent product price comparison database, would that really normally be in place? I would think the space of aircraft parts that could potentially be replaced with COTS parts is not a very large one, and probably not something optimised for at first. Instead, focus would first be on tracking/monitoring military parts, then of separately tracking clearly COTS parts.

Also, there's a human aspect here. Doubt any air force officer wants to be the one to approve a COTS replacement for something like this only to have something go wrong on a flight because of some or other unexpected failure.