They are running a business. Presumably they want people to buy things. Making potential customers do research because the product line is opaque is just throwing away good leads.
Presumably they would want to sell you the lowest-cost-to-manufacture product for the highest price. So, the more you know about the product, the worse for them, because it removes an opportunity to obfuscate.
So, yea, research is a bit tricky, but that's good because the reason it's tricky is because you aren't depending on the company to tell you the real value of their product.
I put in a solid hour of research at least before buying a new pair of boots. It took me many hours over many days to choose a camera. Took me weeks to build my PC. Each of those products I put in an amount of research that's at least somehow correlated with the price I paid for them (boots -> 100$ -> camera 600$ -> PC $1300)