Social media has an almost worthless data base at times, Alan, or less than worthless. For example, let's say you want to buy a jigsaw, and might find some Amazon feedback or a few UTube flicks. First of all, they're all pretty much going to be on the toyish side of things; and in a single year a contractor distributor like my role was, with a big accompanying repair dept, would have a far more realistic data base thousands times larger, and based on real world conditions, long-term manufacturer quality-control interaction, routine access to their engineers etc. But call the local Appliance parts vendors in this town for a GE refrigerator part and they'll cut off your question and refer you to GE's own near-worthless website because they already know the hell involved. But when I was doing business with manufacturers whose CEO's whose careers began as skilled engineers rather than as partying fraternity presidents, and worked their way up, what a difference!
Frankly, I know very little about consumer quality cameras. I've never owned one. The same MF and LF gear I bought decades ago is still going great with a bit of periodic maintenance. My personal shop tools are lifetime, and perhaps even multi-generational. With a little TLC, same with my enlargers and most of my darkroom gear. It was commercial quality to begin with.
Sirius - reviewers for well-read publications - in my case tools and construction equip - today are mostly just lazy types who run to Home Cheapo and pick up several toyish cordless drills or whatever, which also all happen to come from the same massive factory in northern China, despite former US brand names on them. They fiddle around with them each for a few minutes or maybe even some minor test project, and write a article heavy in BS, and oriented to bottom feeders. Since many of those products do bear former US brand names, people just assume they're the same thing as before; but they're not. And often the "best buy" in a review is the worst buy, since it will probably perform poorly to begin with, and need to be replaced frequently.
But since I was a buyer who made it a point to routinely interact not only with our many contractor clients - serious, well educated kinds - as well as key people in manufacturing itself, and buying large quantities of equipment at a time from them, they routinely brought prototypes and even early production run samples to me to evaluate. One time a representative of the Swiss Embassy brought outright gave me a Swiss-made mining-grade rotary hammer, so I could do my review of that category of equipment top-down, not bottom up. I talked to engineers who had jumped from one company to another regarding patents and innovations along the way. I knew the maintenance history and reliability of items from our repair dept. Most of that kind of interaction was for sake of our own customer base, and their trust in my advice; any articles were merely a spinoff.
