I realised later, that most flat panels are optimized to look good on the brightly lighted stores, they have high brightness and saturation, and look brilliant. Even at home at first they look better than the old CRTs... until on daily usage I get annoyed with their poor contrast and colour reproduction.
Yes, on the store a red looking extra red looks good... but when you see on the screen a photo of a relative and their shamed pink face became a monstrous mess of bright yellow and red, then you realised it doesn't look so good...
EDIT: Fixed ortography
Factor in weight (that big old workstation monitor weighed something like 75 pounds, and I hurt my back bringing it down the stairs when I finally got rid of it) and LCD is a no-brainer improvement over CRT. I have no desire to go back to CRTs.
Going the other direction, the Acer Predator XB321HK is a 32" 16:9 (I'm not a fan of the ultra-wide stuff) 4K screen with great picture and GSync if you play games with Green Team's GPUs. It's over a grand and only does 60hz, but it's a big nice 4K panel and it's not a TV.
Lastly, you have things like the Dell P4317Q, which is targeted at stock traders. It's a 43" 4K screen for a relatively-affordable $1350 with a proper DisplayPort input. I nearly got this instead of my Vizio P55-C1 (which is the only IPS screen of all the 2016 Vizio P series), but I liked that the Vizio did 120hz, but I'm disappointed about the lack of real 4:4:4 chroma and the resultant blurry text. Still, if you want a huge desktop monitor, the Dell might be the way to go. The Philips BDM4350UC is about the same as the Dell, and has a lot of discussion here: https://hardforum.com/threads/philips-bdm4350uc-43-inch-4k-i...
Besides the novelty bias you've identified, I also think there's a context bias. Products that make a lasting impact on our lives do so by fitting into the context of our lives - they are well-adapted to the situation in which they will eventually be used. Products that demo well fit into the context of a demo - they look splashy and exciting when shown to a set of observers who are specifically judging the product. The set of qualities optimized for each of these situations differs.