That's a rule to keep players from abusing spellcasting services and to allow you, as a GM, to keep track on what's usually avaliable for them.
But as a GM you should always do what it's better for the story and for your players. Having half of the party dead is not good for anybody, so you should feel free to add a way to have Raise Dead avaliable for your PCs.
If you don't want to make it a big deal make a competent cleric live at the nearest place and allow them just to purchase the services.
But you can also make it a short quest to resurrect their fellow party members (maybe reaching a hermit who lives alone in the middle of the woods and can do it) or anything that could benefit the story.
You might want device a way so they don't have to pay a lot for it if you thinking it will cut too much their WBL and hinder them too much.
The Core Rulebook doesn't have the 3000gp part in there; looks like they added it in UE.
I doubt they added it to prevent party members from being raised/resurrected. Likely to do with some other high level spell(s) that was being exploited.
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The "not generally available" basically means "there's not necessarily someone around in every village the party might stumble into who will happily cast the spell for remuneration."
If you go to a big enough city, someone around will know how to cast Raise Dead. They may not necessarily advertise the fact ("I can return your dead loved ones from the grave" is not a wise thing to put on posters), but it should be possible to find someone who can cast it. When in doubt, I wouldn't necessarily raise the price, but I will say "I will raise your cohorts from the dead, but then you must do me a favor I cannot do for myself" is an old reliable plot hook to get the PCs to go somewhere dangerous. If it's sufficiently dangerous, they might not even want money beyond the cost of material components.
The players hear of a reclusive hermit nearby rumoured to have the power to return the dead to life. After an arduous journey, they find her hut deep in the woods. Strange fetishes made from bits of bone, fur and small dead things hang from the eaves of the hut, and an unnatural silence surrounds it as you approach.
The door opens of its own accord, you find it deeply shadowed inside, and a croaking crone's voice beckons you to enter, laughing that you're right on time.
The walls of the hut seem to lean towards you as you enter, a too tight space that summons images to your mind of being swallowed whole. The smell of dust, bitter herbs and parchment fill the room, and the lack of anything resembling the scent of a human presence is notable in its absence.
A shuffling figure moves towards you, and you swear your ears hear the skitter of claws over the floor instead of footsteps. A scratch and a flare of light that is almost painful to view now your eyes have adjusted to the dimness reveal her face by the flicker of a guttering black candle, an ancient crone with milky white eyes and a leering grin, her mouth devoid of teeth save for a handful of yellowed, cracked things that seem more like fangs.
She cackles at you, ordering you to lay the bodies on the table. No charge, she says to you, poking and prodding the corpses with eerie glee. No charge to bring them back to life. Just a single favour, a simple task, at another place, another time. You'll know when the debt is due, she promises. Oh yes, you'll know.
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One of my player characters died and I wasn't really expecting it so I did two things:
1) We usually played at my place around a table, but I went through a week of PBEM with the player of the dead character. In it, I had him attempt a variety of increasingly difficult simple DC based challenges. In essence, he was receiving prophecy but as the challenge increased it became increasingly difficult to receive the better defined, more clear messages. This tied in nicely with some other things I was already doing but you could easily have some extraplanar being take notice and come to the conclusion they really want the PC alive to finish the task at hand.
2) Having concluded that over the course of the week, I then followed through with where we had left off. I gave them information about a coven of witches capable of raising their friend but they needed help with a ritual. During the ritual they would be vulnerable and for a purely contrived reason their normal guardians were not available. Fill the slot, we raise your friend. Except, the forces that were working against them had *also* become aware of what was going on and wanted to attack the group while they were weakened and planned to do so at the grand finale of the ritual. However, I had the player of the dead character on the side with notes. That player's character had been given, along with the prophecy, knowledge of this ambush and the power to spread the attackers out among the various waypoints of the ritual, to make the encounters manageable. Do it right and the group has enough resources to take out all of the attackers piecemeal. Do it wrong and they will be overcome by too large a group. He was also able to add conditions to players from time to time which also helped diffuse the attackers.
During the session, the other players recognized he was doing this to them but figured he was just helping me out. When he came back to life though, the character was somewhat apologetic about having taken part in things but explained he had actually been trying to help.
Anyway, it was a fun way to handle a character death. :)
Probably mostly a flavor thing. Most expensive spells, particularly if cost by book formulas, are pretty potent and should be a big deal if you are hiring somebody to do this. My general rule is that spells that are 3 or more higher than a caster of your level can cast is a big deal for at least a mini adventure.