Resilience and the high end
The high end is brittle, unstable and thus, expensive.
The car that wins a race, the wine that costs $300, the stereo that sounds like the real thing… The restaurant that serves perfect fruit, the artisan who uses rare tools and years of training…
If there was a reliable, easy, repeatable way to produce these outputs, we'd all do it and the high end would be normal.
What makes something pure enough, optimized enough and fast enough to defeat the other 99.9% is that it doesn't always work. It is far more sensitive to inputs. It's dangerous…
Maybe you don't need carbon fiber wheels. Maybe you merely need a reliable way to get from here to there at a reasonable price.
The high end is magic, but magic isn't reliable. On purpose. That's what makes it magic.