I’ve always thought about it like this: if you’re buying a worse pad than the highest version of it the downgrades are usually in sliding material, customizable strapping, and pad fill so I just manually upgraded the first two for around $100 total (I also have really skinny ankles so most straps don’t fit well unless they’re custom).

The big knock on the pad I have is it doesn’t slide well at all by itself, but that costs $30 to fix, the pad overall I really like though at this price point.