American Elm repot

[Shibui]

I did find out what a bonsai shop charges though and it is $10 per inch of pot and they keep it for a week to monitor its health. So in this case it would have been $200 beans

Nice if you can get it but I agree that sounds way too high for most. And that's allowing professional rates too.

I'm not an apprentice, far from it, I have 4 bonsai and 30 pre-bonsai and have done gardening all my life. Experience is measured in the times you do something not in the times you get paid to do that something

You've hit the nail on the head there. My implication when using the term 'apprentice' was meant to imply relatively inexperienced. 4 bonsai could not have given you a huge amount of experience, surely? Experience is a relative term so maybe it's just that our interpretation of the word is different.
3 hours to repot a single bonsai also sounds excessive. Of course I did not repot the same tree you did so maybe there were factors I don't know about but I can't ever remember spending 3 hours on repotting any bonsai - even extremely root bound after 5 years of neglect. An hour should have been adequate IMHO.
By comparison I have around 100 bonsai, similar number of pre-bonsai I'm developing for myself, a nursery full of pre-bonsai for sale and 40 years experience. I charge around Au$50 per hour for working on customers' bonsai but I'm pretty confident those 40 years experience allow me to work way more precisely and efficiently than most hobbyists.

Enjoy the flight. Sounds like you probably got the better end of that deal.