yeah I feel you man :( for a time only watch 9k is tough. There are a lot of great watches out there at that price and I don't blame you for taking the OP over it. The milgauss has a lot going for it, but the OP is for sure a more versatile piece. 

Such a shame...I wish people were just appreciating the watch. It has a lot going for it.

Just because a brand isn't acting on it doesn't me they don't care first of all. Also even if the brand doesn't care it doesn't change the fact that the practice itself can be bad act. 

Like we all seem to agree that fakes are bad, but lets say a well known watch brand for what ever reason really didn't care about fakes. They said,  "hey fake our watches we make enough money and don't care". That doesn't change the fact that for the vast majority of cases fakes are bad.

I'm not even here to take a super hard stance. I think this space has a lot of room to really be figured out. All of your points make sense, but I feel like not enough people consider the other side of the argument. So here I am to present it haha :)

Yeah I think my milgauss is my forever pieces, but the speedy is really high up there!

For the most part I agree with "Don't worry what others think of your watch and don't worry what others have on." sentiment, but I can't help but that hypermods specifically create an interesting case. We seem to all agree that fake watches are bad. That is the sentiment that I'm gathering from the comments so far. 

So what if someone takes a seiko, replaces Dial, hands, case, bezel, bracelet, gaskets, and everything. All of the replaced components are made to look like a Rolex submariner. Now you might say "well if it has the seiko logo on it, it isn't pretending to be a Rolex." To that I would agree with you, but now it just becomes a fake seiko. 

I had this question posed to me by another collector and I never thought of it this way. Now someone is walking around with a watch that looks like a Rolex but with seiko on it. To the uninitiated that doesn't know about modding, it could reflect poorly on seiko to have such a blatant "knock off", but it wasn't even their creation. 

I think mods can be a fun way to play around with a watch, don't get me wrong, but I think we agree that fakes are bad, but when is that line really crossed? Homages don't feel great to me either, but I understand a desire to democratize style. Modding feels ok, but only if the original watch is still somehow recognized after the mod (in my opinion).

Modding to the point that the original watch is no longer recognizable as such, should just have a logo deletion. If I was a manufacturer of a watch, I wouldn't want my watch being associated with something that was 90% different than what I made. 

The reason I bring all this up is because I've seen a lot more mods that are direct copies of popular Rolex/AP that just slap Seiko on the dial. The only thing Seiko about them is the movement. It feels like a fake seiko and fake Rolex/AP all in one. 

But I agree Fakes are terrible, but I feel like anymore modding and homage watches are drifting terribly close to a less and less favorable world.