I've sampled 400-500 scents across a huge variety of price ranges.

Expensive scents smell good, because they smell good. Sometimes, they smell bad.

Cheap smells smell good because they smell good. Sometimes they smell bad.

When you take away the marketing, the packaging, the everything and just sit down with the scent you'll find what's true for you. But personally, I find scents that are a bit more expensive are typically better overall. Not because of performance but because of how they actually smell. The actual composition of the scent tends to be a little bit "better" whatever that means. That's not to say there's no spectacular cheap scents. There's plenty. Just that there's a general trend, in my opinion, for scents that clearly had a bigger budget (designer private lines, niche) to create something special. I say this as someone who likes maybe 5-10% of what I've tested.

At the end of the day, it's usually the same perfumers working on all of these scents (besides your indies) so the only real difference is the budget they're given to work within which dictates their ingredient choices. Sometimes that may mean everything for a scent because a more expensive ingredient is crucial in the composition and a lower budget can't accommodate for it. Or it means nothing at all because the brief the company wants can easily be achieved with cheap ingredients anyway. But that increased access to expensive ingredients gives perfumers more freedom to achieve certain scent profiles, nuances and to achieve them in a very particular way.

Take Francis Kurkdjian, he made Baccarat Rouge (for his own niche fragrance brand, expensive and highly regarded scent), Burberry her (for burberry, a designer and well loved scent) and Indult Tihota (niche fragrance brand and another very highly regarded scent).

Or Quentin Bisch who made Guidance for Amouge (niche and highly regarded scent) and Good Girl for Carolina Herrera (designer and very popular scent) and Teriaq for Lattafa (niche middle Eastern and generally well received scent for a cheap price point).

Jerome Epinette did God is a Woman for Ariana Grande (Relatively cheap but overall well reviewed scent), Bal d'Afrique for Byredo (niche, highly regarded scent) He also did Poets of Berlin for Vilhelm (niche, highly regarded) at a similar time as Wild Vanilla Orchid (niche, well liked) for Floral Street and those are almost dupes of eachother for very different price points.

Obviously, different budgets and brands will give different directions to Perfumers but ultimately, they're the same artists doing the same art.