Best Camera of 2012: Sony you should learn for this!!!

I do.

(topic digression)

I saw the exact parallel to this many years ago when I was a kid and becoming involved in car racing, both sanctioned and illegal.  As with many kids in Californian cities, we got hand-me down import econoboxes from our parents, particularly Hondas/Acuras.  Of course, nobody valued them for what the parents' intentions were (a reliable and economical car with a better-than-average set of well-balanced attributes)... everybody was interested in proving how awesome and the best-est and world-defeating our high-performance VTEC street killers were.  Those who weren't given one also fell under the spell of peer pop-culture and ended up buying similar as well.  I'm sure everyone who lived in a city remembers Civics/Integras/Accords slammed to the ground, upsized aftermarket wheels w/rubber-band-like ultra-low-profile tires, with barely-not-dragging "ground effects" and high wings that resembled shopping-cart-handles more than anything else.  And often painted in a non-factory color and festooned with stickers.

Anyways.  The talk was usually about "killing" bona fide sports cars and taking musclecars at the stoplight.  The more seriously-devoted would go quite far into utter impracticality to modify their rides to this end, nevermind the fact that they were fighting against basic physics (FWD!) and constraints (low-displacement!) of their chosen platform that scream "this is not what this was intended for!"  Of course, in our communities when we talk enough we would end up rationalizing everything ("FWD can actually be advantageous for acceleration and handling!")...  I mean, we had to try damn hard, but with enough convoluted reasoning, even the most obvious disadvantage can be framed in a positive light.  And we were militant with our ideas.

It was kind of a form of doubling-down.  A stubbornness.  An unwillingness to admit that we had chosen wrongly for the attributes that we now wanted to put at a high priority to not feel dwarfed by the bigger-and-badder competitors of the wider world.  But the power of this delusion derives from the fact that the Hondas/Acuras were actually quite nice and were punching higher than their weight class.  There was a lot to actually love about the stock form of the cars.  So that's the emotional basis, complicated by insecurity and a lack of worldliness to realize, nay, feel that every format of car out there has their own particular advantages and costs.  You are always the underdog, and you always had to assert yourself at every stoplight, mountain road, and the racetrack.

Some years later and many evolutions in both my understanding of cars and maturity (although I'm sure some here might disagree about that one. :P), I actually became a moderator for a RWD sport sedan forum.  I got to see the other side of this "issue", where we had people from FWD econoboxes forums waging forum wars on us, and likewise with muscle cars going at us too from the handling front, LOL.

(topic return)

So yeah...  I guess my point is that this product "cult" is not as unusual as one might think.  It's of no fault of the product nor the manufacturer.  In-fact, it usually derives out of their excellence in a compromise/balance format.  But insecurity makes people forget about the performance compromise (and whatever practical advantage that they got from it) and want to believe that it a non-compromise.  But they meet resistance from reality.  Human nature being what it is, they double-down with zeal and militancy.