Nah, I’m pretty sure his Escaflowne is legit. Once in a blue moon, Rightstuf.com will have a ridiculous sale to clear stuff out. I got the full Evangelion box set (the original one with the cool black box) for about $40.
Also, I got the limited Cowboy Bebop boxset back in the day for ~$90. Envy me. 
On preview, I’ll echo even sven’s assessment of the collector mentality. Anime fans are nuts. 
Keep in mind that the people who get the TV show put on TV may be totally different from the people who put the show on DVD. Most Anime DVDs you buy in the US are licensed and released by US companies (such as ADV in Houston, Texas) who make most of their money off of the DVD sales. I don’t recall if ADV ever gets involved in TV distribution, though I do think they did at one point sell soap. Not sure if they still sell the soap or not.
I don’t know … I just looked at the set and now I’m not so sure. According to this site, the set that I bought fits the profile of a bootleg copy. But I honestly thought I was buying the real thing. 
Expensive lesson learned: if the price looks too good to be true, it probably is.
ladybug, don’t be too hard on yourself: It is in the interest of those persons selling bootlegs to leave you with the impression you’re getting a legitimate product. So, they can be pretty damned slick at times.
I know I’ve ended up buying a few bootlegs by mistake, myself. And that’s while I’ve tried to avoid them.
Personally, I hate region coding on DVDs. It has exactly one purpose: To make it nominally impossible to buy an import version of a given presentation. Since I own about 30 Japanese LDs that have never been released in the US, I’d gotten very used to doing this. Having said that: I won’t bid on anything on eBay, now, that does not state upfront that it is a Region 1 DVD. It’s the best indicator I have found for avoiding bootlegs.