Slight exaggeration there. Actually they usually poo-poo on anything less than the Lelit Bianca at $3000. Unless you get a cheap single-boiler and mod it to fuck.

The $1000-2000 range is this battleground between Heat Exchanger machines, or "buy this otherwise badly-rated double-boiler at the top of the range and just pray because Heat Exchangers are worthless shit and you might as well just go to starbucks".

Fortunately, in my research I found mister James Hoffman, a down-to-earth espresso snob who is also one of the best baristas in the last 30 years and has been a coffee advocate forever. He seems to think a good HX unit is great, and I ended up buying his #1 pick and calling it a day. Because the other machine in my price range people were talking up (and insulting) got bad marks from him. When it shows up, I'll know if I made the right choice, or if the reddit army was right and I needed to save up another year or two.

Reddit's big problem is how much its userbase tends to skew toward men, often single men, in their 20s and 30s who make WAY too much money because they're doing whatever preposterously lucrative tech job that you aren't doing while you struggle in a normie job. Also shout out to similar men now in their 40s and 50s who have been quietly making $200,000+ a year for the last ten years while the average person is doing pretty damn well to pull down 50k, which is the current mean yearly salary in the US.

So they never struggle with rent and bills, and they always have money for pricey toys. Also, capitalism has been unequivocally telling them with a number that they and their opinion are more valuable than other people. Why, they're literally worth 5 of you, just compare the paychecks.

This will not be made clear on the surface, though. You have to live there for a while like it's a city, picking up the fairly obvious clues as you notice them.

Like in 2020 when everyone was in a panic about how they were going to pay their rent now that 30% of the US was unemployed, but at the same time GPUs for personal computers were at just insane prices, $3000 for a top line GPU was the norm for that year.

That did not stop Reddit from buying GPUs at those prices, just to have something fun to do under lockdown. If you aren't on Reddit a lot, you don't get to string together such data points and start getting an idea of how much money these people really have. It's kind of insane. Somebody is buying those $2 million 4 bedroom houses in the Bay Area, it's just not you.

This is also why it's such an infamously good source for answers to techy questions. As much as it is an international platform, it is almost literally just the time-waster of choice for the entire North American West Coast IT community, from SoCal all the way up to Vancouver. New York City is kind of there, but that seems to be a Twitter town. The rest of us on Reddit are just the peasants in steerage.

Also, Reddit might be juuust a little bit autistic, so when they fixate on something it tends to be unreasonable. It's not always so, but there's a trend, one that also tends to mesh well with employment in tech.

You? You just wondered in from the wilderness outside and asked this beast what kind of coffee machine you should buy, but you have more of a Walmart budget. Good luck.