> The problem is that it's hard to be an informed dollar-voter in this environment of deliberate obfuscation. Spending hours wading through reviews, product descriptions, and so on, just to buy one thing, effectively increases your cost, and there's no guarantee you'll make the right choice in the end anyway. I'd be willing to pay more in many cases for a better result, but there's no way to tell if something that costs a bit more is actually better,

This is how I feel about online shopping. I used to naively dream that a retail aggregator like Amazon would crack the problem. By having large numbers of customers leave reviews (or even return unsatisfactory products), I imagined that the good products would rise to the top. To my surprise, Amazon hasn't seemed particularly interested in advancing this area. Search results are dominated by freshly minted sellers with randomly generated names. I often receive products with a piece of paper inside that begs me to let them know if I have any problems so that they can basically bribe me to keep quiet and not put a negative review on Amazon.

The obfuscation arms race, as you so aptly put it.