Man, I have to disagree on this one. The cheap Wahl guards are actually fine if you know how to work with them, and the flex only bites you when you press too hard against the head. I have run the $12 set on walk-ins for two years now and my fades still come out clean, so the guard is not the problem, the hand holding it is.

Cooked in a restaurant for years and nobody ever asks about the ten thousandth burger you flipped either. First one took me twenty minutes and I burned it, last one took forty seconds and went out perfect, and the customer paid the same eight bucks both times. The craft lives in the speed and the feel you build up, not in some special piece that stands above the rest. What people miss is that the ten thousandth one is proof you stuck with it long enough to get good, and that counts for way more than any single item. The first one shows you can do it once, the last one shows you can do it every single time without thinking. That gap is the whole point, right there.