[hansvm]

Part of the problem is that expensive tools are not usually expensive for a reason. Till you work with the cheaper one a bit you don't even know what you want from the expensive tool and can easily buy a "cheap" tool at a high dollar cost.

Another side of that idea is that you often don't need the more expensive features. My immersion blender is the cheapest thing I could get my grubby little mitts on. It reaches to the bottom of the deepest pot I care to use it with, it's plenty powerful to chop up veggies smoothly, and it doesn't overheat on sustained use. It would not work in a professional kitchen, but I don't run a professional kitchen. Any additional expenditure would have been wasted, and if the item were bigger, were heavier, or had more attachments, those would just represent a waste of space in my house.

[yunwal]

The other thing is that I have the "slightly upmarket" immersion blender (Breville) that everyone recommends and mine overheats before finishing a pot of soup. Which made me realize that most people who recommend things (on reddit or anywhere) don't use them enough to have firsthand experience with that thing, they're just repeating what they've heard.