When you think about it, brand loyalty makes no sense, yet it's rampant in the gun world. Almost everyone you meet identifies himself as a "Glock guy" or a "Kimber guy" or an "Sig guy" or whatever. And for what? Just to belong to a club that doesn't exist? The only time being this brand loyal makes sense is if you're taking advantage of interchangable components between differnent models, or to gain a slight training time efficiency. For example, the trigger assembly from my Glock 17 will drop right into a Glock 26. That's a decent reason to start with the hypothesis that a G26 is the best subcompact for someone who already owns a G17. But that's not why people are brand loyal. You're more likely to hear, "Sigs are the best, Glocks are trash." than "I'm just used to the ergos of a Sig and don't want to devote the training time to become proficient with the Glock."
Here's the thing: If a company provides a valuable product or service at a fair price, I will reward them with my business. However, if they fail to do so, or are inconsistent, or I hear reports of them providing a sub-standard level of service I don't have to act like I'm happy about it simply because I may have purchased something from them in the past. Neither do you. Go read a Kimber message board, or go to the range with some Kimber owners, and watch what happens when one of them has a problem. The people who say, "You know, maybe these things aren't worth the money..." will get shouted down by others who bring up nonsensical arguments like, "You should have read the manual - it specifies a 500 round break-in," and "That's funny, my barrels never rusted..." As if ready-made excuses or the instances that a problem didn't occur make up for poor execution.
Contrary to what the marketers of the current world would like for you to believe, you don't join a club when you buy something. You don't owe the company that made your pistol anything other than what you already paid them for the pistol. It makes sense to praise them for a job well done, sure, but to criticize others who have had a different experience is just lunacy.
Finally, don't eschew the opportunity to shoot all kinds of pistols. That doesn't mean you have to buy all of them (don't we wish we could, though), and it especially doesn't mean you have to love everything you shoot. I look at it this way: I've been getting into some amateur race car driving with my father. Some day I would like to own a really nice trackable car like a Porsche or a BMW M3. However, does that mean I would ever turn down the opportunity to drive someone's Ferarri? Hell no! It also doesn't mean that I need to come to Porsche's rescue if people are hammering them with legitimate criticisms. To do so would be to engage in cultish behavior, and when it comes to cars and guns, cults are bad, m'kay?
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