It all depends on your 'hunter-gatherer' personality type. The age-old Apple vs. Android war illustrates this fairly well. One group wants simplicity and predictability and can't understand why someone would waste time on fiddling around. The other group wants personalized and specific features and can't understand why someone who choose something with so many limitations.
The problem is that sites like Dell do not satisfy the fiddler either. Behold the terribleness:
- Head over to dell.com and search for Products->Desktops->For Home (already forced into one choice I don't want to make, Home vs Work)
- Look at the AMD options. Threadripper is listed under processors, so pick that (noting in passing that "AMD Radeon" is somehow also listed as a processor option, and remind yourself this is one of the largest PC retailers in the world not knowing the difference between a CPU and GPU.)
- Get presented with 12 options, none of which are ThreadRipper machines.
- Notice the box at top right that says "Sort By" is set to "Lowest Price". Change it to sort by "Relevance". Finally a ThreadRipper model shows up - but only in 2nd place after an Intel system (!)
If you've ever seen a Dell quote, this wouldn't even be a question. The quotes are HTML tables of random items in no particular order, including such line items as "No Mouse," "Power cable," etc. It is near impossible to compare quotes machine to machine, even those generated by the same sales associate. It's horrid.
Just to be clear, my point was more about the shopping experience and organization of it rather than the devices themselves, and the difference between "Here's one good polished device for X that we stand behind, and there's a few other variants and options on the next page if you want" versus "Here's a hundred choices ... some of them might be real stinkers, and it's your own fault if you pick one of those, so it would be unfair to blame us for that ... We're not going to recommend any specific one because that would be showing favoritism".
I think it's possible to offer a lot of choices while still being like the first category. A site could emphasize how the other products differ from the recommended flagship model, instead of leaving you to try to figure out how exactly all the products differ.
