I don't know what to tell you Walt. Sorry you are having those bad experiences. Not all shops are out to rip you off. I have worked in aircraft maintenance for over 35 years mostly on the airline side as a Chief Inspector/Director of Quality Assurance. Now I run a part 145 repair station maintaining a fleet of flight school aircraft as well as doing outside customer work. I try to run our shop the same way we ran the airline maintenance department. We have a great budget and no reason ever to cut corners for any reason. The outside work is really just filler and to keep things interesting for my maintenance personnel but we approach maintenance on those aircraft the same way. We don't need the outside customer work to keep the lights on or make payroll so I try to be very reasonable (actually more reasonable than I should) on everything. We don't up charge parts or charge extra fees for anything.
What has really been an eye opener for me are the aircraft owners. Someone has an expensive nice aircraft, pays thousands of dollars in hangar rent and insurance every year (I know this because I have my own aircraft), wants their aircraft fixed NOW, and then gripes about every little thing on their invoice. Meanwhile they are buying things like a $3200 EIS system on a carbureted O-360 so they can save gas because they went to Oshkosh and the salesman told them they would save 10%. And don't tell a customer a flight control bracket that you found cracked and broken during an annual inspection costs $400 (Used. Again my cost, no up charge). You would think the whole world was going to explode... Even after you show it to them I get asked, "Well isn't there a cheaper alternative"? One would think they would be pleased it was found before it let go in flight.
You bought a 50 year old aircraft for goodness sakes for over $100k and you pay over $7 for gas for it! You want to it ready to fly every minute of every day. Did you really think it was going to be inexpensive to maintain it? Do you really want the maintenance on your single engine aircraft to be "cheap".