I think the FE business model is just one of many "strategies" that can be employed to boost a company's market position.
For KTM, the FE is among other things, a sneaky way of releasing "next years' bike". But for a company like Suzuki, that is excruciatingly slow in development, a "special edition" model could be a way to distinguish itself from the other Japanese brands.
This is pure speculation from a keyboard jockey but how many factory billet Nissin Calipers get built for factory teams every year (Japanese Nationals, Australia, MXGP and US Nationals) and how much do they change from year to year? If you "economy of scale" that up an additional 500+ units, perhaps you can drop back across the feasibility threshold. Now do the same with a few other bits....maybe some JGR stuff, Yosh pipes, maybe a few anodized bling parts, and you have yourself a special edition bike with zero additional development costs. It can't be that difficult to slip something like that into the production run and crank out 400 special units, can it?
I could see 400 customers opt for a "factory" RMZ over a stock Yamaha or Kawi. But then again...what do I know?
I just feel like if you aren't competitive in the performance game, you need another angle to reach decent sales figures. I also think you can implement economies of scale to make the highly desirable uber-trick hardware more feasible in a production environment.
Maybe the Japanese have all their money tied up in top secret electric bike development. Boom!