This type of reductionism is seldom helpful. Painting is just smearing oil on a canvas? Programming is just "typing a bunch of stuff"? I don't think so. Craft matters.
Part of my brain knows that people who use physical tools for a living use old and slightly busted ones all the time, but another part fantasizes about pulling a Peter Gibbons and going to work with people who actually appreciate the value of the right tool.
Take a Stanley number 5 Jack Plane. An old one weighs less, is flatter, has nicer handles, the iron sits better and the adjustments are better... than a new Stanley. However they are both worse than a Veritas one made on modern equipment, but... at four times the price.
What happened here is that a Stanley in 1940 cost a serious amount of money. A Stanley in 2018 its quite cheap because Stanley decided to stay mass market by reducing quality. However the space they left has been back-filled by newer higher quality makers using modern materials and techniques.
I think a lot of folks nowadays have never used a really good high-quality tool and have no idea what they're missing.
Do you think the tolerances in a Samsung phone manufactured in China are laxer than that? High quality scissors can be manufactured in China. For people in UK to waste their time on it is unnecessary. And that's probably the reason why such endevours usually fail.
The domestic companies are usually the ones left behind after a century of intense competition during a time when quality and longevity were paramount and customers couldn't afford to constantly replace equipment. Chinese industry has arisen in a global market built around a different dynamic--cheap industrial labor selling products to rich consumers who are less discerning, or in any event don't mind buying throwaway tools.
That says little about the inherent skill of Chinese labor and industry and everything about how free markets operate and industrial processes evolve.
China can't match the quality of the very best German and Japanese manufacturers, but they're pretty damned close in a lot of areas. Quality usually starts to slip because the OEM customer demands it - cutting corners to keep the price down is usually the more profitable option.
What does that mean? Why is it a waste of time for a British person and not for a Chinese person?
Given that, wasting an hour to do something yourself instead of paying someone else to do it for you can be counterproductive (see Ricardo's law).
Incidentally, Japan also make incredibly high quality scissors. I am yet to find good cutting tools from China, whether it's chef knives, pocket knives, scissors, or even sidecutters and other hand tools for electrical work.
My point I'm trying to make, is that China is good at making certain things, but not others.
We can also add that there is a certain amount of elitism to say that it's not worth Westerners' time to manufacture something as lowly as scissors.
You're info is outdated now.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/18...