I went for this option. My top of the line Tern GSD cost ~$6,000. A rain shell / completely rainproof outfit, mostly from Showers Pass, cost ~$700. A top of th

I went for this option. My top of the line Tern GSD cost ~$6,000. A rain shell / completely rainproof outfit, mostly from Showers Pass, cost ~$700. A top of the line PEBL would cost ~$13,000. Still roughly double the price, although mass production could probably reduce the price of the PEBL. That said, I've made an alarming/annoying discovery: rain gear doesn't stay rainproof forever! Gore-tex style rainproof gear eventually must be refreshed using e.g. Nixwax at ~$20 a pop plus your washing labor, and it doesn't always work, meaning you have to junk the clothes or accept that they are no longer rainproof. It seems prudent to have multiple redundant rain shells since you can't always tell when your rain gear is going to stop being rainproof until you go out in the rain and get wet. This means that you may have to do significantly more maintenance and replacement for rain gear than you would have to do for the enclosure of the PEBL. In other words, the cost/hassle may depend on how often you have to travel in the rain.