can one really formulate a consistent philosophy of whether to get the mass market thing that "just works" or the power user thing that the author of this article describes as the path to good taste?

(and by "just works" - i mean about 80% of the time)

some of these are even represented in the hacker news front page: iphone vs fairphone, tesla vs corolla, macbook vs framework, vscode or helix, sora vs comfyui etc etc