There is a great analogy to this statement; "Using better components or keeping said components and improving them with wires or other tweaks".
You can find numerous other hobbies where people are willing to spend tons of money on an older product or upgrade to another product altogether. In the Corvette automobile racing or street mods world where I dwell quite often, you will see people adding cams, blowers, every fiberglass bolt on known to man and listed in Mid America Corvette catalog. Some of these mods have real benefits for the normal driver, others, well a radical and lopey cam for the street, or C6R racing wing for high speed track use, do not. But, the owners choose to mod their car and tweak it to suit their own personal taste and desires, regardless of the age of the car. I have seen people buy newer corvettes to get the latest and greatest version of Corvette, the ZR1 and Z06 are great performers in the segment in which they compete, and others, who decide that their older version modded to the hilt are what is best for them. In our Corvette club, some members do race, including myself. Some like to mod and show off, and others prefer stock. As you can guess, people who mod are putting money into their car and most do not care about the majority of the populace being overly concerned about their decision, or how much money they threw away and will not get back if they decide to sell or race their Corvette.
So, if someone chooses to mod the heck out of their system with cables, tubes, fuses, or whatever, and throw money at their system for their own pleasure, I think that is great on them. Yeah, you might still come across systems where you might ask yourself, "what is that mod all about or that mod does what", but you should appreciate the fact that someone else is willing to explore and try unknown and unlikely combinations for the rest of us to see and or hear about.
I am still trying to figure out how to hook up $20,000 cables to a $99 all in one music box. I think the all in one has some "exotic" connectors and the cables will need to be sliced and diced to fit correctly, yeah, that's it.
Ciao,
Audioquest4life