Reliability, followed by trigger and ergonomics are my major priorities when looking at a pistol. Of course price is a factor but I do not think that it is a concrete indication of reliability now days.
Lets focus on this
Do you think that today's $400-500-ish guns have improved significantly to the point where paying anything more is not necessary now?
Simply put, yes, I do. Whether you call them mid-range, barely above entry level, or just flat out plastic crap, the most common pistols in the $5-600 range (Glock, M&P, XDm) will fulfill the needs of most people just as well as a $800k H&K P30 (god how I lust after it) or a $8K custom 1911. Anything above and beyond a Glock, M&P or XDm (what I refer to as the "Big 3") is entering into the realm of wants, not need.
Does a P30 make the average person shoot better in the range that most would use a handgun (i.e less than 25 yards). Maybe, but I highly doubt it. Is a Sig p226 X5 more reliable than a Glock? Once again not likely. You may make the case that the Sig will last long enough to pass on to your grandkids but lets face it, in 60 years there is bound to be something better in one way or another. How about that $8k custom 1911 that sends gun aficionados running for their drool buckets? Does it do anything better than a XDm in the hands of your average shooter? Hardly.
In the short time I have been shooting I have learned quite a bit and one thing that I find amusing is how much gun ownership is like, in some ways, building a custom PC for video games. The last rig I built (the one I'm currently typing this on), cost me approximately $1700 for the tower and all the wonderful silicon bits inside. It was a glorious day when the UPS guy showed up with boxes and boxes of goodies just waiting to be pieced together into a new computer. Now I could have built a PC worthy enough to launch Skynet but for my needs what I have is more than capable of running any game out right now with all the eye candy turned up for full glory.
The point of that little nugget of geek preceding this paragraph is that there are those who are perfectly willing to spend $1k on an Intel 990X processor alone to place in their gaming rigs. $400 for some tricked out, hyper fast ram is only a problem because there isn't something better and more expensive. Motherboards that cost less than $500 need not apply. Thousands and thousands are spent on a computer in the hopes of having the very best possible. And what do they get in return for such a large investment? Faster boot times and frames per second. So a person like me has to wait a few seconds longer to boot up or load a game and instead of getting 115 FPS on something like Call of Duty, I get 95FPS.
The point is that you get into an area of diminishing returns and are left wondering exactly what it is you got for your money. Is a $8k custom 1911 8 times the gun that a $1k SA 1911 is? Not even close. Similarly, is a $1k Sig twice the gun that a $500 Glock is? If you think so, you might have to accept the fact that you are compensating for something. Would I love to have one example of every pistol out there that is over $700? Of course! But I would have to be filthy rich to be able to justify it to myself because the fact of the matter is you are paying a lot of money for something that will not show a significant return on your investment when compared to your run of the mill Glock.
Expensive guns are like expensive cars. They are very much a "look at me" item. If you took Michael Schumacher and placed his narrow ass in the seat of a Corvette Z06 at Streets of Willow racetrack, his lap times wouldn't be much different than those he would achieve in a Ferrari 360 Modena. However, people will flock to drool over the hot Italian and barely give the Vette a second glance. Same thing applies with guns it would seem.
