Its the same with combat skills, you spend 50K EP for that extra 1%.
Production has simply become a game of incremental increases, instead of huge jumps.
With very high volume productions, which will come into play sooner or later, where .5% means alot more than it does now.
Lets call it again, a population issue. We've really become used to 20 player corps with 100 running lines, and then no, even 2-3% doesn't mean much; a few extra hours mining. But when corps get back up to 100 or 200 players like it was near launch, and indy players now have 1m EP running 500 lines at 100 cycles, .5% WILL make a difference.
Edit: and then at some point, when its 1000's of lines running, or making super large PBS structures / titan sized robots when .5% can mean saving millions of NIC worth of mats; that will be worth 50k EP.