OP, I felt the same way before I began making mead. I thought that surely the recommendations to use good honey were surely just "honey snobbery"
and used cheap supermarket honey (about £2 per pound). It had no smell and not much taste, and didn't make a nice mead, although it certainly got drunk and might have helped if I'd left it to age longer (it had 6 months at least).
If you use cheaper honey (though if you can, don't go for the very cheapest), you can use other things to add flavour like fruit, spices, apple juice etc. You can also use a little expensive honey to sweeten the mead after fermentation, rather than using lots of expensive honey to ferment, and maybe losing the nice aromatics you paid for!
The way I see it is that a cheap bottle of commercial wine costs me at least £5. Even using very expensive honey, mead will hardly cost that! I'm now happy to spend about £15 on a 5 litre batch of mead, which gets me 6 1/2 standard wine bottles of mead for about £2 each - much cheaper than any commercial wine and way more special
It takes a long time to ferment and age mead, so the initial investment is all the more important -you don't want to open a bottle of your mead after a year or two, and wish you'd used better honey!
If you can, don't think of it in terms of 5-gallon batches. That's way too expensive a thought for me, unless someone hands me a huge bucket of honey! Single gallons are easier on the pocket, and less to worry about if the mead doesn't work out. You can also afford to experiment.
A beekeeper might be the way to go, but where I live they sell their produce like it's liquid gold (well it almost is!) and even directly from the bee(farm?) it's never going to be cheaper than commercial blended honey.
Got a birthday/other gift-giving event coming up? Ask for honey!