I really loved your comment, it's something that we take for granted these days with it being easy to buy these things.
For me I've been collecting (mechanical) watches for 20ish years. Half my collection is high-end Swiss watches, and the other half is more ecclectic but I have a real soft spot for the former Soviet designs.
They were not expensive, and even now you get a great watch for €50 because they made so many of them.
Although the focus of the USSR watches wasn't that level of quality you see in the Japanese pieces they're so rugged and simple that most of them will outlive me.
I regularly buy 50+ year old watches that have never been serviced and still run properly. Obviously there's some element of survivorship bias at play, but the engineering there is top-notch.
Thank you for your kind words. I’m not sure what the state of prosumer digital photography is these days, but about a decade ago, if you wanted to build a lens collection on a tight budget, you looked for vintage Soviet-made camera lenses. They were super cheap and functional.
I sometimes feel like functionality and longevity were hallmarks of pre-2000s manufacturing. I remember my mother talking about an old children’s bicycle that a relative had bought in Germany. That bicycle was passed across through multiple families, and an entire generation of kids learned to ride on it.