ARC: A guy takes a billet of high order alloy that he cuts to length. The he places it into an American built Haas ( I hope) VF series mill and clamps it into a work holding fixture that he made right there in the machine shop. The same human being, collecting an American work force pay check, then touches off his tool changes and dry runs his machines program that was very likely generated on American produced Solid Works and VectorCam. Every once in awhile, the machining gods exercise their sense of humor and for no reason at all, he ends up with a few bad parts and find himself speaking in angelic tongues. Until that billet has a keyway broached into it and the polisher is happy, some American has ownership of the thing. The quality of ARC parts speaks for itself. Obviously, someone is proud of making their parts and rightfully so. I could fight off a gorilla with the thing on Friday, drive fence posts with it on Saturday and install it on a crank and race it Sunday. Durable don't begin to describe it.
PVL: Great part. Different story. A mold is machined. Usually, these molds come out of China. Yes, even the Germans are looking at value added outsourcing. The process is one of automation, pressure casting, stress normalizing, and good old fashion German engineering excellence. Direct human labor is minimized. That is the big cost driver in pretty much anything these days. It is adequately durable, totally anonymous, and damn ugly. It is also less expensive and gets the job done just fine.
I like the ARC program. It is where I prefer to spend my money. Nothing against the PVL stuff, it is just fine for its intended purpose.