Once again I have nothing against them. Never heard them and no opinion on the tech involved. I am just saying, based on the picture, for an iem, they seem thick, not very convenient, and the finish on the sockets is not very neat. So I am not sure what you point is sorry.
I think I should have begun my post by saying something much more like "I agree with you regarding their appearance and perceived ergonomics. They are like that for specific reasons, and here are those reasons".
Most of what was in my post probably could have been just as (un)understandable as a stand-alone post. That said, here are the points I was trying to make, or thought I was making, more clearly stated (or at least I hope they come out that way).
Portable gear, cabling included, has very different physical/size/handling constraints than home gear does. I know that's obvious, certainly when baldly stated like that, but sometimes the obvious needs to be stated out loud in order to make a case for certain other cliams, which may be less obvious. What I have in mind here are considerations like:
How to power a device- having to use a battery vs having approximately 2000 watts of ac power from the wall sockets to work with. Having multiple operating voltages for different blocks or stages in the gear, where you have much more space in the chassis for home gear than portable.
For digital stuff, e.g., having Terabytes vs. Gigabytes for storage, and at lower prices -all other things equal, small costs way more $$.
For cables,being able to use materials that may be stiff and bulky in order to maintaiin consistent geometry and proper spacing throughout the length of the cable, and to be able to use larger conductors in order to exectue a design properly And, having large enough connectors in order to fit those conductiors into vs, having tiny connectors, which almost mandate more fragile constructions, because of their size constraints....
On the more business side of things, it seems to me like the bulk of the headphone/iem-specific cable providers are either relatively new to the scene, or are (almost) exclusively limited to the headphone/iem ccable categories. Most of them are cottage businesses, and their wares are very similar to each other, brand to brand, as they are sourcing much of the same "parts", and building very similar designs. None of this is by way of criticism, simply a matter of fact. Companies like Cardas, Nordost, Audioquest, Kimber and, of course, Wireworld, the topic here, are long-established cable producers, that have offered ranges of "speaker-system-based" cables for years. While they don't agree with each other regarding the best way to make a cable, they do each apply very consistent design principles across their cable lines. Some have applied these designs to headphones, and not just by chaning out connectors on their prexisting interconnects or speaker cables, but by designing and having manufactured cabling specifically for headphones. Wireworld is the first to apply this to oiems as well, but they have not done extensive marketing for those cables yet.
At the end of the day, I think all this adds up to the typical trade-offs to be made kind of situation we run into in all aspects of life. Being an audiophile/gear-head/music-lover already puts us in the minority ("Hey, my phone already plays music and movies, why do I need a stereo system anyway-it would sound the same-right?") I've got cables from the usualy suspects on Head-Fi for my iems, and I have some Wireworld cables for them as well. The WWs sound better, but are less convenient to use so far. Perhaps they can up their game without compromising sonic performance. Similarly, I think my Aurender Flow plus 11.6 Win10 notebook plus Jriver sounds better than my DAPs, but it sure is a pita to carry around, especially if I wanted to use it to listen to music while walking, or by shoving the components into a huge-pocketed vest or such-like. Gotta choose-
Mim, hope that makes it more clear- in any case I was not being critical of you, nor do I think you took it that way.
