One of the supposed pluses of the rifle was that it was made mainly of stamped sheetmetal parts and fewer machined parts making it cheap and easy to produce. $1800 for semi-auto copy isn’t exactly cheap.
The purpose of the original weapon was to reduce costs to the German army and industry by 1942.
The Heereswaffenamt (German Army Weapons procurement office) sought a weapon lighter than a crew-served weapon but with tactical effectiveness superior to say the MP38 and 40, requiring a much less powerful round than standard bolt-action KAR 98 or heavy machine gun rifle caliber round.
2 companies submitted prototypes, Haenel and Henschel and the concept was greenlighted with all due speed, especially in light of the fact that the German self-loading rifles G41 and 43 were extremely expensive to manufacture and overly engineered for routine field service, leading to unreliability.