You have to know which parameters are meaningful, any tricks that could be used in presenting them, the degree to which the person/entity reporting them can tru

You have to know which parameters are meaningful, any tricks that could be used in presenting them, the degree to which the person/entity reporting them can trusted for accuracy, anything that's changed about any of that stuff since the last time you checked, and probably more I'm forgetting about. Being even halfway informed about a majority of the products one might purchase is a time-consuming PITA that too often results in the discovery of the bathtub quality graph and the realization that all you can afford is cheap crap and more expensive but barely better rip-off crap, because that's all that exists short of the ZOMGWTF high end (or, possibly, becoming way more informed and spending even more time shopping for quality used products). If you do find someone serving up quality mid-priced stuff, they'll probably be disproportionally expensive for what they are (if not as high as the luxury market, assuming there is one for that product) for reasons of low scale and the tiny market of informed consumers providing less support for competition. It's not that no-one ever becomes an informed consumer of any product—it's that so few do that it's hard to sustain oneself selling real quality to bargain-seeking informed consumers, and when a company manages to they have trouble scaling to a point that they can lower prices and capture more market share. There's also less room for competition to survive, so there goes another price-lowering mechanism. And good luck getting distribution when retailers make a better margin selling faux-quality at the same price. It's not that you can't ever possibly succeed doing that, it's that it tends to be much harder, resulting in the observed crap/ripoff/luxury (luxury category not always existing for all products) categories of so many goods in practice. Incidentally, agreed about good machine-made things being possible. Maybe small scale manufacturing/fabrication will get really cheap and break us out of this mess. As it is, they don't usually design the robots to make good stuff (if you can point me to machine-made knotted wool rugs that'll last 100 years at a substantial discount from the hand-knotted variety, ideally without my having to become a rug expert to verify that they really are similarly durable, please do)