Spend a week in any watch community and the tell shows up fast. The energy isn't really about how a watch looks on the wrist or feels through a day. It's about placement. In-house movement over a supplied one. "Homage" said with a curled lip. The quiet contempt for quartz, for fashion brands, for whatever the newcomer just bought with genuine excitement. The object is almost incidental. What people are actually enjoying is knowing where everything ranks and making sure you know they know.
I say this as someone fully inside it. The hobby dresses up status competition as connoisseurship, and the dress is convincing because the technical differences are real. A better-finished movement is genuinely better finished. But notice how rarely the conversation stays on the thing itself and how quickly it becomes a verdict on the kind of person who'd wear it.
That's why the ladder never ends and satisfaction never arrives. If you actually loved watches, a watch you loved would be enough. The hierarchy guarantees it can't be, because there's always a tier above, and the point was never the watch. It was the standing.