When I Googled the Citation model, I noticed two things that account for price and one that probably accounts for acoustic quality. First, everything about that model, from materials to features, screams "top of the line." Second, these were limited-run instruments that clearly must have gotten a lot more individual attention from the builders--so labor costs would be significantly higher. And if the builders spent a lot of time carving and voicing the box, that is likely to affect the instrument's voice, perhaps even the consistency of voice. (I suspect that a custom-shop model is more likely to be influenced by the oversight or even hands-on attention of a single craftsman.)
I'm sure I have offered this anecdote before, but it has a bearing here. Nearly thirty years ago, my friend Tom Crandall built an archtop in his grad-student apartment. He used nearly all hand tools (though he says he did have some kind of power tool to rough out the top and back), and once the guitar was structurally complete but unfinished, he started to voice it by stringing it up, playing, then unstringing and refining the top with a finger-plane, then playing, then planing again, and so on, until it had the voice he wanted. (The top has a marked recurve around its perimeter.) Then he French-polished it. The result is a very responsive and flexible instrument. And if built today, it would certainly have to have a five-figure price-tag (as big-name archtops do) to be a viable commercial item.
I suspect the Citations have something like that degree of labor and attention to sonic as well as cosmetic detail in them, even if they're not necessarily the product of a single pair of hands/ears. Which would also explain why, say, L-5s exhibit such sonic variability. There's only so much finesse one can expect of a commercially viable line of guitars.
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