I don’t really understand your frustration. It could be that you have never shopped for a product that is constructed to meet a set of standards. It is just like buying a motorcycle helmet, you can spend $100 to a $1,000, they all meet the same standards and studies show the cheapo protects just as well as the big buck ones. So why the difference in price? It is everything else about the helmet, weight, comfort, features, venting, looks, paint, etc.
There is not going to be a helmet that is rated to protect you more than the standards. How could there be, there would have to be a new set of standards and testing system for that. Manufactures don’t rate their own helmets. If they were to say it was safer, what would that really mean.
You'll understand my frustration if you think about what I said and what you said for a minute.
How can a product manufacturer boast that his product is safer than a competitor's, or indeed, safer than absolutely minimally necessary? I dunno, man, but car makers do it all the time. Manufacturers of all sorts of products do it, and sales personnel really harp on it, and so do consumers, on forums like this. That whole scene is conspicuously absent from the field of bike helmets. Why?
And it's not just safety performance. I said I get the same answer pretty much no matter what features I ask about. At least in the field of motorcycle helmets, there are tons of different features that distinguish one product from the next, and the effort to sell you on these distinctions is very conspicuous. The most you usually see in bike helmet copy is claims about the shape of the helmet or the holes in it. That is not a lot to distinguish one helmet from another.
POC's multisport helmets (some of them) have an inner part that can detach on impact and rotate independently of the shell. I won't go into the idea behind this feature or whether it's likely to really contribute to safety. I'll just say it's the sort of thing I'm talking about, and I wonder why there's not more of it in the helmet market, and why I had to look so hard to even find out about it.
Mostly we're told that the helmets are the same. That's kinda lame, isn't it? For a supposedly must-have product that your life supposedly may depend on? You wouldn't expect, I dunno, some level of interest in the product itself?