IEM's are becoming such exploitative cash cows these days. I find it absolutely absurd that they're charging this much extra, for just a few extra drivers and some minor sonic tweaks, and ultimately in essentially the same, really not that great, cheap housing. There are literally $30 earphones on Amazon that have better housing quality and materials (though not necessarily comfort). I wouldn't be surprised if the manufacturing cost to Westone was orders of magnitude less than the asking price for these, and I really can't see R&D costs being exorbitant either.
I own the W40's, and very much like them, but really only after some minor EQ tweaking to get rid of some of the veil and overt warmth. Without the EQ, I wasn't blown away. Having said that, ironically I actually prefer the W40 (and the UM30Pro) in terms of overall sound signature to the W50 (versus vanilla W40) and also the W60 (vs EQ tweaked W40), and more ironic than that, I also preferred the sound of my original Westone 4's to the W40's, but I've since lost my 4's, and that's after I previously had them replaced when one side stopped working, so in the end I've simply stuck to the W40's as my go to.
Adding more inanity to it all, one of my W40's still creak ever so slightly when squeezed where the clip on piece goes, which again I find ridiculous for a (at the time) $500 pair of earphones.
It's weird that Westone seemingly keep charging more and more ludicrous sums, for what is to my subjective tastes, often worse sonic performance (reading the impressions of the W80's, even here the feedback seems somewhat mixed). I guess ultimately they have likely reached sonic limitations within this tiny housing, and adding more drivers isn't really adding objective improvements to the sound, just random subjective sonic tweaks. There's probably only so much you can squeeze through these tiny little nozzles, irrespective of however many drivers you stuff in there.
Even though I am a Westone product user, the company has really fallen out of my graces. I really feel like so many of these manufacturers these days are taking advantage of their consumers, using the reputations they've amassed over the years in order to get away with increasingly massively worse value proposition, with each new upper tier release.
/rant