The enthusiast crowd are the ones that provide funding for the advancement of the GPU technologies, so whether you spend $50 or $1000 you help the entire industry, and gaming genre. I have been disappointed before when I bought into a very expensive line and just a year later the product failed completely, but that only brought on the opportunity to buy something even more powerful.
When it comes to joysticks that is almost never true. Joysticks are like cars. Cars are fun to look at, sometimes fun to drive, but after some time they just get old. Cars are, after all, just cars. If your car gives you a problem you either fix it, or trade it in on a new model. The same is true of joysticks, except gamers tend to stick to a particular model. The reason I have not bought into the more expensive sticks is that I know down inside of that stick is a component that is going to fail, and while that stick is out for repair (that is, if the company is even still around) I will either be forced to use a junk stick, or go without.
That is why I, and I presume many gamers, stick to the brand they know even when said brand has an ever increasing failure rate.
