Yup! How thin can you slice the baloney?

The highest cost parts really are nicer, but even the lowest end parts do actually work. In real life the functionality goes up linearly but the price rises exponentially. Each step up costs almost twice as much as the previous level. There are so many levels that the functional difference between adjacent groups is usually too subtle for me to notice. As you can see, Deore ranks in about the middle. That's why Andrew Stewart resisted the "low end" comment.