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"I reassess my business model and retool the machine to accommodate the new market".

OK, that involves various things:
(1) deciding what service you can provide at the price people are offering to pay,
(2) assessing whether your customers are prepared to accept that level of service if it means a reduction in the services you have previously been able or willing to provide i.e. will you still be offering a service people will want to buy?
(2) assuming it is, working out what income that is going to provide you with
(3) deciding whether that is sufficient for your needs
(4) assuming that it is, deciding whether you like the work enough to do it for that level of income.

If the ultimate answer to (3) or (4) is no, you stop doing that and find something else you'd rather do.

That's fine when it involves a non-contentious service like probate or conveyancing. No-one has to buy a house or make a will.

Unfortunately, in litigation generally no. 2 is not really something that's within your control. (And quite often it's not a choice that the client can make either - they are invovled in litigation whether they want to be or not). Judges and court rules tell you what they require you to do. In other words you have no choice over a key element of the cost model.
A failure to do a proper job will result in 'wasted costs' orders against you and/or compensation payments for professional failings. And your own professionalism will drive you to try do the job properly.
Of course that still means that you need to go through the 1-4 process. But traditionally, for everyone except those specialising in white-collar fraud or the most in-demand crimninal counsel, crime has been relatively poorly paid compared to other types of legal work while imposing high (if not the highest) standards of excellence, so the marginal ability to accept lower returns is limited. Hence more criminal lawyers are likely to find that the answer at (3) or (4) will be no. Indeed it may be that for most that will be the answer.

If so, that has significant implications for the way in which our criminal justice system operates.

As a society we have traditionally prided ourselves upon having a functioning criminal justice system where the guilty are given a fair trial and the innocent are acquitted. There are sound public policy reasons for that which I'm sure I don't need to spell out. If we as a society decide we don't want to pay the cost of running that sort of system, and we can tolerate 'rough justice', fine.

But we need to understand that that is the choice we are making i.e. that we are not that bothered about defending the individual against the State.