I love watches but have a hard limit at about $200-300. I live in Japan and you can get extraordinarily good quality mechanical (i.e. “real”) watches that are made domestically for that price or even less from great brands like Seiko and Orient.
Anything beyond that is IMO just pretentious and tacky in the sense that you’re kind of just flaunting your wealth.
My point is that yeah watch fandom kind of really sucks, I unsubbed from r/Watches and never looked back.