A few years ago a customer brought their touring bike to me after having someone else rebuild the front forks. Normally the bike would be pretty wallowy,it is a touring bike, but the front end was absolutely ridgid. He was a longtime customer that searched for another wrench when I started building rods and let the bike work go. The other mechanic( using the term loosely since I trained him and knew he was a fool) threatened him when he took it back to have it looked at. "There is NOTHING wrong with that bike" he reportedly stated while kicking the guy from his shop. He located me and asked if I'd look at it and I always try and take care of longterm customers, so I told him to drop it off. When I pulled the forks down, I found a 6" 3/8 drive extension and the damper socket still in the fork...no wonder it was ridgid. Since the tools that I found were some of the ones he stolen from the shop, he didn't even know they were missing.
Price is price, but most tools become workhorses because of their functionality, not brand. One of my favorite ratchets is this little $4.99 job I picked up in the checkout line one day.
1/4" drive on one side, 3/8" on the other. I figured I'd try it out and if it lasted two weeks I'd have my money's worth. Three years later it is doing great and gets more or less constant use when someone in working in the garage. Jeff bought another like it, a 3/8" and 1/2" drive version, to add to the collection and it gets used a lot too. Useful tools if you have lots of different versions of sockets - deep, shallow, 6 pt, 12 pt, impact, etc. that are spread across many drive versions.
