I forgot about this thread.
I tried ordering the fancier winches from Alibaba and the manufactures would just reply with quotes for the same old shitty cheap ones. Never got one of them to actually price what I was asking for.
But after a wheeling trip to Windrock last weekend, I did make some observations. We pull A LOT of cable. 11 rigs, probably pulled at least 100 times over two days with all of us. I had my old beater with an old weathered Warn 9500 something on the front and an ancient 6k or 8k on the rear. We had several Smitty X2O's and XRC's (I have an X2O on my other rig), a couple of the new Badlands and a couple of the cheapest noname amazon ones. And then one of my buddies on the second day had his ridiculous rig with an 8274 in the front and a warn 10k in the rear.
The warns outperformed the imports hands down. Even my old clapped out warn was better. The really cheap ($200) amazon specially was so painfully slow and noise that we probably could have set up chain and a come-a-long faster.
I think my new opinion is - I'll buy one of the imports for a seldom used rig, trailer or some place where I won't likely be using it much, but for my trailer rigs I think I'd rather buy an old used warn, throw some new rope on it and run it.