It's a shoker, but nice things that are done by people who love making them have a tendency to be expensive.

Don't break your back moving those goal posts. If you cared about "nice" you would have said "nice" and let everyone understand what you mean. You said "expensive" because you meant "expensive", the core value slipped out.

> nice things that are done by people who love making them have a tendency to be expensive

No and no. People love making things as much as anyone loves their job, and the price of your output is not what determines it. Niceness and price are almost completely independent characteristics. You can have beautiful cheap trinkets, and garish expensive jewelry, and everything in between. Look no further than when you need an expert to tell apart real and counterfeit items. Or when your "nice and expensive" luxury items are cheap crap because nothing says "made with love so it's expensive" like luxury companies making a $50 bag with slave labor and selling it for $3000 [0]. In the end what matters to some people is the visible price tag, that's the signal, that's the core value.

In the real world you’d flash some bling and people would instinctively give more weight to your opinion. Here it has to stand on merit. So I see why price is such a core value.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/2024/06/24/italian-...