This kind of thing happens way more than it should, where you pay more and somehow get less. Same deal with clothes, coffee, furniture, price stops meaning quality once the brand gets popular enough. For notebooks I just check the dots in the store now, flip to a middle page and lay a card edge on it before I buy.

Oh man, you just blew my mind a little with the guard vs blade size thing. I've been calling the #1 and #1.5 "guards" for years and nobody ever corrected me, so now I'm wondering how many other guys say it the same lazy way. And you're right that freehand lever work is its own skill, it's not the same thing as snapping a comb on and running it up the head. That old timer was probably doing lever work the whole time and calling it "no guards" to sound cooler than he was.

Guess that driver never met me at 5am, I'd have just nodded and gone back to sleep.