I can virtually guarantee that the latter part of what you say will very much apply as the cost of the parts plus service charges would make the job a most uneconomical one, as to be quite honest about it and terrible as it is to say, camcorders are devices that in most cases are not automatically always worth repairing unless they were originally an upmarket higher price range device.
Even with the relatively simple lens cap problem, which by the way your model is capable of suffering from, can cost about half the original price of the camcorder due purely to the service charges involved, as the CCD that gets replaced cannot really be classed as an expensive component, on the other hand though the mechanism or parts of most definitely "are", that is as well as them not always being readily obtainable albeit that they may well show as a part number in a list.
Pity you don't actually know anyone technically inclined used to working on small pieces of precision electro-mechanical equipment that could assist, as "private" repairs are the only real viable option with these type of time consuming jobs.
