>Sous Vide is a market closer to colanders than blenders. There's a couple of ways you can make a colander wrong but there isn't any appreciable way you can make a colander that drains water better than your competitors. For the most part, people buy the cheapest colander that isn't obviously terrible and leave it at that. Nobody has become a colander mogul and made their fortune on branded colanders because all of them work about the same.
This is not a good comparison. There's a lot to be said of the reliability and quality of a sous-vide cooker, especially in a restaurant environment where if something goes wrong you get a lot of people sick instead of just yourself. The $120 Anova cookers are somewhat toy-like compared to the commercial-grade ones (see: PolyScience)
The components inside a SV cooker are dead simple and it's very easy to make them reliable enough to not matter. The Anova isn't a toy at all, even at $120, reliability has been very good and many people report running them hours per day over multiple years. Even if an Anova only lasts 3 years and a Polyscience lasts 10, by the time the Anova dies, you can pick up the next gen model for half the price and still save money.
The only big tricky issue with SV is dealing with humidity and electronics but that's fairly simply fixed just by making the electronics low power enough to be passively cooled and completely sealing them as the Joule has done.
Unless you are cooking for >4 hours and within a few degrees of the pasteurization threshold, all you are compromising is the quality/consistency of the food. If you really need to ensure food safety, you're going to be using an external temp logger anyways.
Honestly all the PolyScience gets you is capacity in water circulation and even then you're going to be limited more by the insulation capacity of the container.
This is not a good comparison. There's a lot to be said of the reliability and quality of a sous-vide cooker, especially in a restaurant environment where if something goes wrong you get a lot of people sick instead of just yourself. The $120 Anova cookers are somewhat toy-like compared to the commercial-grade ones (see: PolyScience)