Couple reason...
1.) Being a P. ME, I love to tinker, modify and develop my own ideas …I could never see myself doing this with a $4K time piece. And if I screw it up, I don’t care.
2.) I like to see how the watch suits me prior to laying down thousands of dollars on some thing that I will be sick of after a couple of weeks. Rep give me a good sense of knowing if I really want the watch before I go break the bank.
3.) A rep is still a rep. Yes they have evolved leaps in bounds in their quality, but they are still not the real thing. Keep in mind reps are a duplicate of work that has already been completed. It is much, much, easier to reverse engineer some thing that has already been made. Looks at some of the high-end Asian brand watches…they are equally expensive as their Swiss counterparts. Why? Because of the R&D required to develop them and NOT copy some thing.
4.) Gen forums a all about how much someone spent on their time piece and not about…well what we have around here.
You wife is right about, "your buying a brand name on a bracelet"…but you can say that about a $1000 purse, $600 blue jeans, $800 shoes and just about anything else…Want to get her going…Tell her that the diamond in here ring is "Just a rock pulled out of the ground." You want to talk some thing that is overpriced… I takes years to develop and tool up a watch and its movements. Breitling spent 7 years developing, testing and refining their B01 movement. It takes a week to pull a rock out of the ground and turn it into a jewelry quality stone, no R&D required.