i wear AE jeans, 35 bucks, Im 20 pounds overweight, 37 years old, balding, no amount spent on clothes is going to make me look better, and frankly I don't care.
I bought a Colt when the dollar was high last spring because my super duper expensive AR was complete crap so I went with a company thats been doing ARs for a long long time. Changed it a bit to my liking. came to about 1700 with all the mods, half what I spent on my disastrous Christensen Arms. Ill never forget that horrible experience where I spent 3500$ on an AR that would not feed 20% of the time and would not extract 20% of the time, so defective 4 shots out of 10!!!!!
Will i buy another AR, most probably not, the restrictive status is a deterrent, but I always wanted one so I got one. I will now gravitate back to NR semis.
So my suggestion to the OP is just like with women, to stick to the middle of the pack, do not go with the cheap Chinese crap (Norinco)and do not go with the super expensive crap (KAC), stay in the middle and you'll be very happy. A lot of people and vendors here will disagree with this, but this is the most sensible thing you can do.
Just like dating a super model will make you as miserable as dating an ugly chick, an expensive AR will make you just as unhappy as a cheap AR.