[mikelockz]

I like your table analogy. I would think that a more ergonomic hammer would also have tangible benefits like the ability to work longer and faster, creating more tables per day and lowering the overall costs of production resulting in cheaper tables.

Would customers be willing to buy a cheaper table that's wobbly vs a more expensive table that's not?

[lhorie]

I'm not comparing a wooden stick with a high end hammer. I would think a competent carpenter would have a decent enough hammer, but not necessarily the shiny cool x-titanium-3000(tm), because any difference, if they exist at all, would be well into diminishing returns territory.

At the end of the day, the wobbliness of the table is a result of whether the carpenter cares about table wobbliness more than which hammer they use. However, it may say something about the level of craftmanship and competence of the carpenter if they got suckered into buying a well advertised x-titanium-3000(tm) to compensate for an unwillingness to put in the effort to master core carpentry skills.

Another similar analogy is an audiophile buying gold plated HDMI cables for better sound quality, oblivious that the reality is that the signal going through said cable is using a digital protocol with error correction.