I know what you do for a living Lucid and i respect the answers you give on here to questions , but i think you are wrong on this . cost comes into everything
Respectfully, I disagree.
Then, you'd expect me to say that, wouldn't you?
For most of us without a Bruce Wayne trust fund, cost is always a factor. Of course it is. But if we reduce everything to cost then it robs us of the maximum enjoyment of whatever hobby we indulge. For example, would you expect the sort of person who buys a super car to worry about the cost of fuel and tyres? You see, that's implicit when everything is reduced to cost.
Naturally you'd ask the question why they bought the car in the first place. There's no easy answer to that. Human motivation is often a complex and sometime contradictory thing. It's the same puzzle when I've seen people buying nice AV gear only to run crappy download and file-sharing streams on it most of the time. Why bother spending all the time looking at- and comparing the best TVs, amps and speakers etc in their class and then hobble the system with a blooming awful source? Yes, it's free - and you can't get lower cost than that without being sponsored to watch - but it doesn't do the system any justice.
You could argue that they're happy with the quality of the source they run. In my experience though this type of customer is more likely to upgrade their gear sooner than someone who runs better quality source material. They're always on the lookout for the next bit of gear that promises "better" in some way. To me that suggests they're never really happy with the system performance. I'm not complaining. Serial upgraders are good business for me, and so I've learned to stay quiet about the fact that they're spending more in the the long run than they've saved on an individual deal. This is how I correlate cost-based purchasing with being a bad thing.
To give you another example, look at the business of making televisions. That is almost entirely driven by cost. The real premium brands of Pioneer and Fujitsu curled up their toes a decade ago. Panasonic and Sony are losing money hand over fist on TVs. Names that were once synonymous with quality midrange gear such as Sharp, Toshiba and Hitachi are now just badges on the same TVs that sell as Polaroid, Blaupunkt, Technika, JMB, Wharfedale and a dozen or more other vaguely familiar names. The entire market is reduced to a handful of manufacturers, and as a result consumer choice is more limited than ever. All this is due to reducing things purely to cost.