COR should be FREE. It is in most other countries
Hangon ... CoR may be free, but transfers are not (well they are kind of but not really) ... you pay for a 12 month renewal every time you transfer a .com domain. Yes, it gets added to the existing expiry date so you are actually getting value for the money - but it's still a cost I'd rather not pay until I need to, especially if you need to move a large number of domains between registrars because they are no longer providing the service you need.
It's far more likely that I'm going to be transferring a bunch of domains than I am to be doing a CoR (I have a Synergy Wholesale account, so I buy domains for my clients using their own registrant details).
When I moved my entire domain portfolio (around 600 domains at the time) from TPP Wholesale to Synergy Wholesale, it would have cost me (and my clients) a lot of money if I'd had to pay transfer fees. Anything which discourages movement to a different registrar is a worse outcome in my opinion - we should be free to move providers without penalty.
I'm not really in favour of moving to the .com model of free CoR but paying for transfers.