The question I've had for years is: why is the ~$300 closed segment such a black hole? Maybe it's a golden age compared with the bad old days, but what a pile of ultimately "A for effort" products. I end up having to tell new audiophiles to buy IEMs instead.

a snare drum being bashed with ear horns.

Easy as hell. Headphones pretty much do stop at about $500 (HD 600/650 and the Paradox) with regards to overall tonality. Most of the $1000+ flagships are actually worse in many ways despite being better in other. If you're a consumer who just wants to take it out of the box, plug it into an amp and rock you don't want to worry about shoddy quality control, hot treble, wonky mids, or offensive resonances that need modding to go away it's very hard to really recommend most of the more expensive headphones. People shouldn't have to heavily equalize or have upstream gear that smooths out the high end just because a headphone was voiced by someone with high frequency hearing loss to have treble that sounds sparkly and detailed for ten minutes in the store but is painful for two hours of listening to well produced recordings at 80-90 decibels. The sparkly treble spikes of false detail lovers should be force stand next to a snare drum being bashed with ear horns.

........But what Changstar has done for me (even though there is plenty of love for certain expensive items) is to curb a lot of my drooling over the well-known hype-train items.....