If that's the position your going to take. Without doing what you literally always do, and by that I mean toss red herrings into the dicussions to trip up the opposing arguement when ever it is against your beloved allies, how do you explain the performance differance between the ost P4 and the T34/85 considering the difference in price is literally negligiable, but the t34/85 performs better in both an AI role and an AT role and overall having a much greater utility to the player? Or how a T34/85 is usually 1 or 2 rear armour hits away from killing a panther 1v1, yet it costs so much less and has much better AI capabilities? Do you think the opportunity cost of the oh panther is inline, considering it's tech and cost are almost equivilent to two P4s? And on what emperical metric are you basing you considerations on?
That's easy.
34/85 is not a stock tank, you're committing yourself to a doctrinal choice.
Plus, when the tank was single call-in without tech, it had costed 140 fuel and its balanced like that, having to tech to get doctrinal unit already puts some strain on the eco, play USF or soviets once in a while, you'll see it.
And no, 34/85 does NOT perform better AI-wise, that still goes to P4.
And last but not least, while if your panther is 1-2 hits from death against singular 34/85, you might want to actually move and micro it next time as each 34/85 shot have less then 50% to pen it, while it will always pen 34/85 while not having that much longer reload then 34, so you're talking either, horrible micro case or extremely bad RNG.
You're also completely ignoring designated role of the panther.
You're supposed to use it vs heavily armored units, which 34/85 is not, StuG excels vs meds and below, Panther excels vs heavies, if you're fighting opponent who spams meds, don't go panther, go StuG, unless you're poor on micro, then go for panther.