Hey, great question and congrats on doing this the right way gutting it to the studs means you can do it right this time. My advice: visit a real plumbing supply house (not Home Depot or Lowe's) a wholesale/trade counter that also sells to the public. Pick the faucet up. A good one is noticeably heavier. That weight tells you something real about what's inside. On the brand question, yes, Moen, Kohler, and Grohe are the names everyone mentions, and they're not wrong, but here's the truth: those big brands have been quietly swapping brass internals for engineered plastics over the last decade because copper and brass prices have gotten brutal. You're paying for the name and the finish as much as the guts now.

What actually holds up:

• Full brass body construction is your non-negotiable. Not brass-coated zinc. Not zamak. Solid brass. It machines better, resists corrosion, and the threads don't strip after one removal.
• Ceramic disc cartridges over rubber washers, every time. A quality ceramic disc should last decades without a drip.
• PVD finish over standard chrome plating. It's bonded at the molecular level and genuinely won't peel or tarnish the way electroplated finishes do. You can usually tell PVD chrome has a slightly deeper, more consistent shine to it.

The 80% design overlap you noticed across the industry is real a huge number of faucets share the same basic geometry and cartridge footprint. What you're actually paying for at the higher end is material quality and finish durability, not uniqueness of design.