Is buying from overseas even worth the hassle — need advice

Adding the clinical framing, because it changes how the question reads. The useful move here is to separate what is established from what is widely repeated. Those two sets overlap less than the confident tone of most write-ups suggests, and the second set is where nearly all the disagreement on this board comes from.

I would rather be corrected than agreed with, if it comes to it.

pat_auckland said:

The useful move here is to separate what is established from what is widely repeated.

I read this differently from pat_auckland, on substance rather than tone. This treats a plausible mechanism as a demonstrated one. Plausible is where you start looking, not where you stop.

pat_auckland said:

The useful move here is to separate what is established from what is widely repeated.

That holds where the measurement is reliable. Where it is noisy — and a lot of what gets tracked here is noisy — the same reasoning produces confident nonsense.

pat_auckland said:

The useful move here is to separate what is established from what is widely repeated.

That reframing is the part I needed.

Moderator note: the sourcing question belongs in the vendor section and has been split out.