[CoastalCoder]

Seconded, I think. I've been very happy with my Valve Index, but I don't know how it compares to newer headsets on the market.

More broadly, I find that Valve represents my interests far more than Facebook/Meta does. So I'd much rather send my money to Valve.

[munk-a]

I'll third this - Valve is really unobtrusive about the steam related features of the index. It does have some requirements with steam for setup but if you want to run a local binary and mess around with dev tools it's extremely easy to do. It's also extremely well sealed and designed - I tend to sweat a lot and a few times I've been beat sabering for quite a while without any long term damage to the headset.