The problem is I used to be able to spend a couple dollars on lightbulbs that consistently looked great and didn’t require a ton of research or money. I’ve bought hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of high-end LED lightbulbs since moving into my new place last year, and the lighting here still looks like crap. Even with budget it’s hard to get something that looks good. Finding something that dims without flickering, the issue with dimming not actually warming like mentioned in the article, trying to match color temperatures to actually look good, so many issues. I’ve tried to splurge and get good lights and good dimmers but I’m still not happy with how it’s turned out. And if you go in any home or restaurant where they haven’t dedicated substantial time and money into good lighting, things are downright painful these days. I desperately miss incandescent bulbs. I’ve been told by several people that I seem oddly sensitive to this, but it’s a huge deal as far as I’m concerned.

The problem is that previously the low-effort default option was great, and now the low-effort default option is bad and to get the equivalent of the previous great default you must now spend a bunch of extra time and money. "Caring about CRI" is basically just caring about the human visual system working correctly, that shouldn't be some weird niche.

Besides, I don't control the lighting decisions of every place I go that's not my own home. And many people might be impacted in tiny ways without even noticing (cf. the old research about fluorescent lighting in schools/offices impacting mood or concentration or whatever).

I bought Feit lightbulbs at a big box home store (not the cheapest option). Half of the 6 I bought failed in 6 months. The rest seem to be going strong at least…

Not in my experience. It's always a crapshoot.

> Most people don’t want to pay the premium and don’t value the benefits that come with that premium.

This is also called boiling the frog. People actually do care, but in the scheme of things, they'll accept it.

The default lightbulb in the store 20 years ago had a tender warm light. The default lightbulb in the store today has garish light, or doesn't dim, or has that ugly plastic half cover. A real decline in quality of life. but sure, we can be dismissive about it, of course you can spend hours on the internet figuring it out (ignoring the fact that it took no effort whatsoever to get nice lighting before).

> you can do the research to find those brands and pay extra for them

This is such a lie - no, you can't do the research. There are no reseatch papers conparing consumer products

Doing the research means buying everything avaliable on the market and testing it yourself.

Googling is not research, its choosing which SEO'd fraudulent article will lie to you today.

Quality is going to shit, because there is no way to twll apart which item is qualify. The market is failing.

Reddit's /r/buyitforlife 's 1.4 million subscribers and probably 10x as many people that visit without joining reddit and the subsequent similar population of people scraping that data and consuming the scraped data... I think they would disagree with you.

That said, even if that's generously 100 million people that's a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the population of consumers that couldn't care less.

Yeah, just paying £2000 fot an item does not mean you got anything quality - 90% chance you got scammed

Which? magazine is an equivalent in Britain.

https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/light-bulbs/article/how-to-b...

(Both will be irrelevant for Americans, I have never noticed a multi-voltage bulb.)