What is the Silliest Accessory You Have Ever Seen.

There is a question here that is important. 
Masking is a concept we use in medicine daily. You can provide meaningful pain relief by creating a stimulus that is louder than the pain. If you don't want to hear your car rattle turn up the radio. The simple Band aide is such a technique. Put one on a cut and within a minute the pain goes away. When I give 4-6 year old's injections I have mom stand in front of them and they give her a big hug (looking in the other direction)
They never feel the shot. They always ask if it is over yet. Yup, then a giggle and big smiles. With adults you just squeeze the skin firmly and they don't feel it. There are numerous other examples.

So in audio we have these "tweaks" that in many instances have no reasonable explanation for effectiveness. Anyone with a science oriented education will say right away that they are bogus. Then some people swear on improvements which they are sure they are hearing when in reality if I did a blinded experiment they would not hear anything. But, is this any different than masking. Masking is real pain relief. Are imagined sonic improvements as good as real ones? Much of it is harmless enough. Some manufacturers come by it honestly. Others blatantly lie and create misleading and sometimes stupidly silly marketing to sell the product as in the case of the Hallographs. So, it is not only a quality argument but an ethical one also.
All of us are subject to virtually the same physiology. Education, training are the major difference. The training an electrical engineer gets is way different than what a lawyer gets and one will know virtually nothing about what the other does. Some of us will not hear an improvement because our training will not allow it. Others are more suggestible.  What I find most interesting is that you hardly ever hear of a tweak making things worse. The odds favor that a certain percentage should make things worse but the way we procure and utilize them always favors an improvement and that is purely psychological. 

Well, in that list of Stereo Times 2020 or so most desired components, I came across $2,844 “fuses”...

Seems like an excellent candidate.

Dear Mijo, In my original post on your disdain for fuses, I acknowledged that the little fuse screwed into the back of your equipment indeed cannot prevent damage due to a lightning strike. However, lightning strikes are rare as..... getting struck by lightning. There are innumerable equipment glitches that can kill you, take out a power transformer, destroy your circuitry without killing you, that fuses DO protect us from. Your knowledge of electronics is sketchy. DC voltage is the least of your worries with a transformer. For example, in any conventional power supply, capacitors are used as filters to remove AC ripple from the DC output of the supply. Each of these filter capacitors is connected between the DC voltage rail and ground. If one of those capacitors fails such that it shorts the path to ground, then the transformer sees a sudden huge current demand. (Due in part to the fact that there is suddenly zero or very much lower than normal resistance between the high voltage rail and ground, which means the transformer is asked to pass infinite current momentarily.  In that case, the little fuse acts much faster than the circuit breaker. This is Ohm's Law in action.) Your realization that that has occurred might only be smoke rising from your kaput power transformer. Or worse yet, those capacitors may put voltage and current on the chassis, such that when you touch a conductive knob, you receive a possibly deadly shock. (In an unrelated episode, I once saw a woman die when she touched a metal control on a frozen yogurt machine, due to cardiac arrest.  This was in the NIH cafeteria, yet.) Stuff can also catch fire. Similar phenomena can occur if a solid state device or tube fails such that there is a hot to ground short within its body. Fuses are there for a reason, and where there is a fuse, it should be rated for the current recommended and left in place. Knock yourself out with boutique fuses, if you like, but do use fuses.

Lewm, based on what you posted I would say your knowledge of electronics is sketchy too. It's all relative. Caps don't fail truly hard short, typically partial short and the transformer ends out blowing out the short (and the cap).  The yoghurt machine had a fuse. The metal control would also have been chassis grounded if assembled properly so you are saying it had a faulty ground connection AND an internal wiring failure.  More likely conductive liquid buildup but that's a guess.

"The equipment winds up protecting the fuse!"

Taking into consideration quick depreciation of used audio equipment and availability of more and more expensive fuses, this may be good thing.