I felt like getting back to this game and figured I'd play with the DLC but then I saw the price... What is this?! A map, a mech and a mission or two priced the same as Witcher 3 Blood and Wine? Both DLC together don't seem worth a 20, they're trying to squeeze that out of people for each?! What the hell are they smoking over there at HBS? What happened to this company after the Shadowrun games?!

to put it simply, it's because you're cheap.
You're comparing brand new DLC to a 5 year old game that's now out of primary sale rotation and in the bargain bin. $10 has kinda been the going rate for expansions since the 90's fam.

To put it simply, you seem to be talking out of you rear, fam.

1. The Battletech DLC (definitely not "expansions") are priced at 19.99, not 10.

2.The Blood and Wine expansion for The Witcher 3 was priced at 19.99 at release.

Source: https://www.polygon.com/2015/4/7/8363739/the-witcher-3-dlc-expansions-hearts-of-stone-blood-and-wine

It's currently at 17.99 (and unlike Battletech's glorified map packs, is worth every penny and more), so despite being old, it's the furthest thing from bargain bin.

3.The 90s had big ass expansions rather than DLC drip feed and they were usually priced closer to 20 or 25, not 10.

4.You want something more recent, look at Deadfire's Forgotten Sanctum DLC. It's small-ish but still 6-ish hours for story content and at 9.99 it's half of what HBS are demanding. Or look at the Stellaris DLCs, same publisher. The big ones introduce multiple new mechanics and fundamentally change the game and are priced at 19.99, same price HBS is peddling their 1 new map and 2 new units at. Even Stellaris' story packs, which are half that price, arguably bring more content than UW and FP. Civ 6's civilization packs arguably bring similar amount of content and those go for 5 or 8 bucks.

I'm more than happy to pay any price, as long as the content matches it. The problem here is that it doesn't. They're demanding 20 bucks for 5-10 bucks worth of content and that's not okay.

So, thanks for your contribution, but if snarky and unprepared is all you can offer, it might be better to say nothing. Fam.

You greatly understate what the DLCs of Battletech offer. Its not only a new map and a new mech.

The first offers new mission designs with Flashpoints and with the new Battlemechs introduces Battlecomputer and a wider variety of different missions and maps.

The second one adds totally different strategies with ECM and some more things.

Still you can argue its too expensive, but you got the Season Pass at release for a good price, but still its way more than what you say it is ... and compared to plytime, you get quite some playtime, especially with the first expansion. And yes those expansions are comparable to what Paradox games offers in their bigger expansion packs.
Comparing a strategy game with a RPG doesnt really help here, you could add FPS where games at full price offer less than 10 hrs of gameplay.

In fact I have nearly 700 hours of playtime with BT and its expansions and I still play it regularly.

Paradox happened.

I don't think I do. I did note the missions as well. It's just that, while the list isn't exactly extensive, it's inconvenient to list all the small additions every time I refer to the content. It's priced higher than the game itself ffs, how is that a good price? They really aren't.
edit: I'm referring specifically to Stellaris as I haven't played other PDX games. I do know though that PDX has a reputation for their DLC practices and even Stellaris' have come under some criticism More power to you. I didn't quite get that much out of the game but I still enjoyed it and consider it worth its price, maybe even more. But each of these tiny little DLC is priced at half the game's cost while decidedly not bringing half a game of content. I'm not sure how you can defend that.

The season pass was 20% off for all 3 DLC, and I "defend" them, because I do like what they added to the game to make the experience more fun and the stories of the Flashpoints really were ery nice, especially if you know the lore andthe old books. There are lots of nice reappearances of old characters and some real fun missions ... just to mention "Steiner Scout" for the people who know what it is.

And I dont see how Stellaris added significantly more with the addons than BT did, they are both strategy games and every DLC for BT added other interesting strategies, although I would see more reason to use light mechs over my 100t assaults in some missions.
You mentioned they just added a map, 1-2 missions and a mech, which definitely is NOT true.

Edit: FP added 18 Flashpoints, all 2-5 missions long, added 3 mechs, new mechanics for Battlecomputer and Melee Weapons, one new mission type and one new biome. Urban Warfare added 10 more Flashpoints and the new ECM bulb, which makes light and medium mechfights more interesting and challenging, 2 mechs and new coop missions.

I love the base game, it exceeded my exspectations content wise, although its much less optimized than I would like. I bought flashpoint on preorder and was disappointed at what I got for the money. Felt like a $10 dlc rather than a $20 expansion. Urban warefare looks like about half as much content as flashpoint for the same $20. Its a $5-10 value. I would be happier if it didn't exist at all. For now I can play without it and enjoy this great game, but at some point its going to start causing compatiability problems with any mods I want to use.

Same here, and over 600 of them are looking at loading screens.

Love Battletech, kickstarter backed it and preordered the season pass when it was introduced.
Don't remember what I paid, maybe a bit less than the 50 it's going for now. Got hundreds of hours of playtime out of it.

That said, the DLC are not good value.

Flashpoint was kinda ok, a whole new way of playing the game, and I did.
Only... career mode is just the same as the story mode,
only without the story bits and well thought out missions and, but with more grind.
Oh, the flashpoints are not bad, they're just not excellent either.

Then Urban Warfare, whee, 10 hours of new content,
here and there in the 100 hr playthrough of career mode.

Heavy Metal.. sigh.
If its a handful of flashpoints and a few heavy mechs, I'm not sure I'll even bother to play.
If it were something I could just sink my teeth in and gobble up, yeah, but to play the
career through again? Another 100 hrs to experience a bit of new content.


So my advice.
It's a good game. Play it. Base game is fine as it is.
If you want more, play career mode with DLC. If it's too expensive, wait a few years.

My issue is the advertised download size is 6MB. That tells me this is an unlock for what is already installed on my computer. I would perfer to not have anything front loaded.

There's a sale now. The Season Pass is discounted on GoG for the first time since the pre-release sale. DLC cost is only like $12/ea. I think it's a decent value to support continued development of a good game.

You make a very bold assumption that this is a good game, which isn't true and the 3.6 rating proves it.

its a good game... the 3.6 rating just means it is not for everyone

Actually the rating is quite fair. Battletech was butchered, compared to tabletop original, and only with proper mods, restoring TT mechanics is deserving more that 3 stars. But modding disables multiplayer, which is high price for many players.
Also many reviews were written quite some time ago, where performance was very poor, making game nearly unplayable without mods aimed to improve performance.