You know, I think I would fully agree with you @roxy54 if most of the cables we are talking about cost less than $50 and very few more than $100 AND if we spoke of them mainly in terms of the materials, designs and workmanship employed. In other words if they were treated like normal wires. However we are talking about products that can cost as much or more than everything else in a system. These products are also treated as proprietary black box systems that reveal as little as possible about how they are made and what they are made of and what distinguishes one product from another, except for very general and vague market speak. They publish no test results, little or nothing about their physical make-up and often no rationale why we should even expect them to work.
We all know how much time and effort we put into researching and comparing products in the rest of our system. Many of us like to get under the hood and,usually, quality shows there as well as in the music made. Reviewers do the same for us, often including objective testing along with subjective impressions. Why do we tolerate less from cable manufacturers? Why excuse this category of product for making us play blind man's bluff? For these reasons I do not consider cable shopping part of the fun and am calling on equipment manufacturers to help us poor consumers make sense of all this. I believe they have the knowledge to do so and that the market would reward them for behaving like a no-nonsense square shooter. I like companies like that and bet you do too.