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Thanks, very helpful post, cheers! You can see I'm a noob obviously, but it is also interesting as an outsider looking in - from my perspective it's like going into a bike shop for the first time and only seeing Pinarellos built up by dudes doing the Etape.
So if I may make a crass analogy, is having a Submariner the equivalent of having SRAM Force eTap on the commuter? Ie a way to enjoy ultimate design and functionality completely removed from its intended context? Or these watches still genuinely used for navigation on boats and planes?
youramericanlover-
For me history is a huge part of it. So wearing something like an Omega Speedmaster, a watch which (movement aside) hasn't really changed for the last 50 years, is an awful lot like being able to ride a painstaking replica of a 1973 Colnago Super Pantografata with all the original shifters and tyres in situ. Sure, there are faster bikes. Sure, there are more functional bikes. But there's a romance to those old bikes, and there's a romance to those old watches (even if they're just old designs and not actually vintage, they're from the same school).
We've all made our peace with the idea that technology has overtaken clockwork watchmaking. We each hold an atomic clock, linked via an international connective network to the most accurate timepieces in the world, in our pockets, and it's a camera too, and you can make calls on it. No mechanical will ever be as accurate as your phone. But your dad, and your grandad, and your great grandad, never read the time on their phones. And for me watches are about the measurement of time, not just in terms of minutes and days, but generations. Like I say, the romance!
ReekBlefs
I think we'd all probably challenge the key point of your post - i.e. that overdesign is the norm. Because if you ever look at the classic Rolex sumariner or Omega Speedmasters or what have you, they're never overdesigned. They're masterpieces of functional design.
So I wonder if one of the reasons you have that perceiption is because of the shops. If I ever go to an Omega shop they'll never have the nice minimal sandwich dial SM300 but they'll have loads of the wavey background skeleton hand SM300. I think that's primarily because if you just want an Omega you can buy one of their less popular models more cheaply, but if you want the one that you want, you're prepared to wait, and your'e prepared to pay full price for it. When you go to many watch shops, the ones you're looking at are the ones left over.
That's the only explanation I can think of for your perception. Sure there are gauche overdesigned watches designed solely to be bought as 40th birthday presents by dutiful wives (or, as someone memorably put it on here, by a 30 year old insurance salesman with his first bonus) but speaking personally, clean elegant design is at least half of why I loev watches. Busyness is the opposite of what I look for.