Why the dearth of faster piston-powered planes?
There aren't very many fast piston airplanes in production. By "fast" I mean, if you look back in the early to mid 20th century, before turbines won out, there were lots of piston airplanes in production that pushed the practical velocity limit of propeller-driven aircraft, cruising 360+ knots in military planes, sometimes as fast as 330 knots in commercial airliners. And this was with a terrible understanding of aerodynamics and piston engines compared to today.
Today, for both singles and twins, the fastest speeds around aren't much higher than 200 knots. ~240 knots in the case of the very fastest couple available airplanes like the Cessna 400 and fastest Mooney.
There are indications that with modern materials and engineering, much faster speeds can be achieved using piston engines already available. The Cobalt CO50 Valkyrie design claims to push a spacious 4 person cabin up to 260 knots with a single 350hp engine. The recently-certified Diamond DA-62 can move a spacious 7 passenger cabin at ~200 knots using only a pair of 180hp engines.
Why aren't there more faster piston airplanes available? Would the market not be interested in piston powered planes that could do 300 knots? Shouldn't you be able to make almost those speeds for a very small plane powered by a single commonplace 350hp engine? Shouldn't you be able to make those speeds in a more spacious plane with a pair of commonplace 350hp engines?
My understanding of the marketplace is that the #1 reason people choose piston is cost. And isn't the cost of operating piston engines, even two piston engines versus a single turboprop, much much lower? How much does a 350hp turbocharged piston engine cost brand new, $50k-$60k? So even buying a pair of them is $100k-$120k. And then how much does a single comparable turbine engine cost? ~$800k with proportionately higher rebuild costs per flight hour? Plus 20%+ higher SFC than a piston?
Basically, I see the Piper M600 listed at $2.8M, or the TBM930 listed at $3.9M, and I don't understand why it would be hard to achieve nearly the same performance for a fraction of the price using a pair of cheap piston engines. For example the Piper M350 has the same 6 passenger cabin as the M600 and also includes pressurization, and with a single 350hp engine makes over 210 knots on a very old airframe with a list price of under $1.2M. If you basically built the same airplane but reoptimized for twin engines and using modern materials and aerodynamics, shouldn't you be able to achieve near 300 knots by adding another piston engine? And shouldn't you be able to sell the resulting airplane for well under $2M, and with a significantly advantaged SFC (and therefore range and payload) than the M600?