It's worse than that really. A lot of people are like a acquaintance of mine. Bought a FT DX 5000MP, which wasn't cheap, has hundreds of books on the matter, boxes of cables and bits of antenna, speaks knowledgably on the subject but hasn't made a single contact yet after 5 years of having a license. But he hates 'feng scum like me.

Not with a Baofeng. Long distance DX is typically done with HF gear at lower frequencies. Baofeng is a 2-meter VHF radio where communications is basically line-of-sight.

You're right in the context of Baofeng HTs, but people get equally furious about some Chinese HF radios as well, like the Xiegu X5105 or Recent RS-918 (though the argument with that one is that it ripped off the open design of the mcHF, but the fact that it's an all mode, all band QRP HF transceiver with better features than the likes of a Yaesu FT-818 costing hundreds of dollars more probably factors in as well).

Very true, HF radios are nothing magical. Very common parts can make you as good HF radio as physically possible.

$10k iComs are mostly unicorn poo, with exception of somewhat useful DSP filtering, for which the real cutting edge research in radio tech is said to be used.

So true. One of the first things I did was build a direct conversion receiver with decent audio filtering. It had 45 mostly discrete components and sounded as good as a top end Yaesu. Similar to this one: https://aa7ee.wordpress.com/2012/07/27/using-the-nm0s-hi-per...

You can do satellites and ISS with a feng though. Don’t have to go across or round, up is good too :)