And in one world no matter how much you pay, if it is a Glock it is junk.
LOL! Your personal prejudice is obvious:lol:, and the "world" to which you refer must require a
spacecraft to reach. I owned a Jennings J-22 once... the firing pin snapped after less than a half box of ammo. If
that's not an indication of
crap, I don't know what is. Rohm (now UMAREX) made some poor quality "Saturday Night Specials" in the 1950's and 1960's, but they were
cheap (not to be confused with inexpensive). Everybody understands
cost... not everybody understands
quality. Criminals can rob a 7-11 or a gas station just as efficiently with a J-22 as they can with a Wilson Combat model, and if that's all they want a handgun for they don't have $1,200+ invested in their tool. For criminals, the firearm is (primarily) a tool of intimidation, and the big difference between the J-22 and a Wilson would be the size of the hole at which the victim was staring.
I do agree with your assessment of "gun snobs", though. I have no use for a handgun that I can't
depend upon, or for one that costs more than some vehicles I have driven. We don't have to spend our kids college fund, or take out a second mortgage on our home, in order to buy a high quality, dependable handgun. I have no personal need for either extreme in handgun quality. A decently maintained 10 year old Chevy Impala will take me anywhere a new Bugatti will, it just doesn't yell "HEY!! LOOK AT ME - I HAVE MONEY!!" Every type of property has snobs! The "look at me" toys are their trademark - their way of saying "I have more money than you do."
Regarding Glocks specifically, I have had one of the first commercial G17 models since the mid-1980's (around 1986 [± 1 year] as I recall), I've put at least 25,000 rounds thru it, probably fed it almost everything made in the US, and never experienced
any kind of failure to function. I do keep it
reasonably clean, but I am not "anal" about it. I have many different major manufacturers handguns (Colt, Glock, CZ, Kahr, Ruger, S&W, etc.) all purchased
new, and I have never paid less than
$250 (except for the Jennings, which is long gone) or more than
$550 for any of them. They all shoot pretty-much POA, and the only trouble I've had with
any of them is when the rear sight on my K9 decided to depart the slide about 6-7 years ago - an easy, inexpensive fix.
Personally, I have never had an experience with a really cheap (other than the Jennings, which I bought from a cash-strapped private individual as "NIB") handgun that made me blurt out, "I MUST HAVE THAT!" (The dividing line between "cheap" and "inexpensive" isn't always clear to folks, but in my world
cheap is a $400 pistol that has frequent FTF/FTE problems, and inexpensive is a $250 pistol that works every time for a long time.)