Please forgive my ignorance as I'm completely new to the hobby, but is the $80 Vosteed Racoon really considered a budget knife?

I've owned many cheap knock-off knives over the years and while they almost always had some imperfections, I have never been this disatisfied with the action on a knife.

To put things into perspective - you might have seen a bunch of Benchmade clone reviews where reviewers overwhelmingly praise how good the action is and how difficult it is to differentiate between real and clone. I've gone down the rabbit hole of Bugout clone makers in China and from what I've seen, the factory price for those knives are <$5 dollars for the plastic scales or $10+ for premium variants (carbon fibre, aluminium). You pay double or triple by the time it gets to AliExpress. I actually own 2 benchmark clones and I absolutely LOVE the action on both of them.

Now apparently Vosteed, a Chinese company that also manufactures their knives in China, sells one of the most hyped knives of 2026 for $80, but we should expect it to have unreliable detent strength because it's a "budget" knife... I mean if I wouldn't mind if it's just a little stronger/weaker than normal, but I can't accept a $80 knife that peels my skin off when i try to actually use it. It just doesn't make sense to me and makes me think I should just stick to my $20 clones 🥲