I think it should. Microing a Panther should be rewarded. Keeping the frontal armor at the enemy doesn´t help you much. The Panther takes a lot of damage this way. It should go down when flanked and that should be encouraged, rather than parking medium tanks in front of it.
It's the fastest medium tank in the game an an awful lot of CoH2 maps are just totally devoid of any possibility of flanking at all. Make do with what you have.
The cool thing about the CoH series is that the roles of hard counters and smart gameplay matter more than the price (at least most of the time). If I was to build two Panzer IVs (700mp/260 fuel) and park them in front of an IS-2 (640mp/ 245 fuel) without any micro, they would lose the fight. Why not the same with the Panther, which btw. can´t handle infantry as well as other tanks?
Because you're comparing two fairly different scenarios.
Two Easy 8 or T-34-85 against a panther, frontally, are an option you can just about get away with because those two tanks have a reasonable chance of penetration. You'll notice that the two mediums cost around 150% of what the panther did, also. It's two fairly heavy anti-tank mediums against a sniper anti-tank medium.
In the case of two PzIV, you're talking about two more generalist mediums fighting a heavy anti-tank brawling tank, and you're barely at 110% of the cost of that IS-2.
You can't just compare costs without considering unit stats and roles. The relative pen vs armour roles of Easy 8/Panther and PzIV/IS-2 demand different tactics. Axis forces have AT guns with very high values of pen and heavy AT options for dealing with IS-2 that the PzIV is simply not an option for.