[Confusion]

I've ignored the "Direction of Flow" arrows on some long lengths and had them fail, reversed the cables and had it work. There is real engineering that goes into these things

You're bullshitting us. At least, I hope you are, otherwise you are sadly misguided. There is no way in hell you can design a cable in such a way that it will pass signals in one direction, but not in the other.

Resistance, skin effect, impedance, capacitance, cross talk and inductance all conspire to disrupt the data

You're just repeating electrical engineering terms without understanding them. Impedance is the combined effect of resistance, capacitance and inductance. The skin effect is an effect that adds to the resistance.

They all don't 'disrupt' the data. In the simplest terms, the resistance influences the amount of power required to transfer a signal, due to losses in the cable. The capacitance influences the amount of time required to transfer a signal, because it may be viewed as the resistance to signal change. Inductance is the only one that may change the signal, but it only influences AC signals, which, at most, act as the carrier for a digital signal. It doesn't change the digital signal.

The fact that Infiniband cables are cheaper than these kind of HDMI cables should also be recognized as a large red neon sign screaming: you're being scammed.

[jodrellblank]

There is no way in hell you can design a cable in such a way that it will pass signals in one direction, but not in the other.

Did someone just uninvent the diode?

[Confusion]

I was coming at the problem from a sane angle and meant that there was no way in hell that you could design a cable in such a way if you were simply trying to design the best possible cable.

If you are suggesting that Monster seperates each of the wires in its cables into multiple parts and connects them with electronic components emulating a diode (you couldn't just put a diode in; that would screw up the cable), then yes, it could be done. It would be an insane way to actually let the directional arrows make sense, but granted, when taken literally, my original statement was wrong.