For the tools that we use day-to-day and week-to-week, it should be impossible for us to not be a judge of quality. A have a tale of ladles... those pieces of kitchenware that we use to slop soup into our bowls. For years and years, I'd only had really horrible, shitty ladles. Those plastic-handled, plastic-everything-ed pieces of garbage that Walmart buys in volume for 3 cents each and sells for $12.99, you know the ones I'm talking about. With bizarro neon-green colors that are so flexible that you know there must be three dozen banned-in-the-United-States plasticizers in them.

And if you could find one that's just plain stainless steel (with or without a nice wood handle), it was paper-thin steel, stamped into shape, that no one had ever bothered to grind/polish the burrs off the edge.

Then, just a few weeks ago, my wife and I were checking out this tiny little Korean grocery store. And the owner apparently orders everything from some Korean supplier. He had several different sizes of ladels. Stainless, in what must be 3/16ths, all the edges soft and beveled. The shape was nice too, not something rough and rushed, but looking like someone who cared about design actually spent time on that. And the small one was like $3.89 and the large was $7-something. This did not come from a Chinese factory.

Am I a world-renowned ladle expert? Do I have a PhD in ladelology? No. Hell, as a utensil, it's probably one that I only use twice a year. I couldn't design a die to make one of these, I couldn't tell you if the hydraulic press needed to be 50tons or 250tons, I'm not very knowledgeable at all about any detail that matters. I just care (some interesting psychology there... childhood trauma or something).

I don't think anyone needs to be especially qualified to judge the quality of products that they do or will use. Everyday experience should suffice, and the only people who might not manage that are kids who have just recently graduated and mama's not doing their laundry for them anymore.