[djoldman]

There is an interesting counter balance to this consumer tendency: the business.

Businesses/organizations in a lot of ways act much more "rationally" than the individual consumer. So you'll see generally better car/truck maintenance in fleets than by consumers.

Then there is a cool feedback/blowoff valve where more expensive + higher quality "pro" tools get discovered by consumers, drive up demand, the price falls, and then the features become common.

[franga2000]

Don't forget the second half of that feedback loop: other manufacturers come out with their poor approximations of those features at lower prices, consumption shifts to that because quality isn't clear from the labels, the quality manufacturers don't move enough volume to hit similar prices, so they end up either killing them or cutting corners.

[djoldman]

:( Yes, I think this is definitely the case.

So then it becomes a cycle. It's risky to make a high quality initial product that's expensive because it requires the buyer to understand and trust why they should pay more.

Eventually the market demands the higher quality and the pro series gains adoption, only for the the cheap stuff to come in again.