Yeah I'd agree.

Condor isn't "high speed" or slick but it works and it's cheap. They're usually my recommendation for people buying their first set of gear - cheap enough to learn what you need/want and durable enough to survive new people.

Why, though?

Surplus stuff is fine but a lot of it is piecing together what you need, a lot of the time it's in real rough shape, and you're often sacrificing QOL features like MOLLE without any real gain.

I've yet to see anyone truly destroy Condor stuff at a rate that exceeds surplus. It's fine for getting started.

The quality point makes sense if you're talking about deploying, I'm not talking about deploying. I'm talking about people's first forays into gear in which case Condor will do them just fine until they're ready to move on to better things.

Sure, I can spend $60 on a TAPS that's been sitting for two decades in brown or I can spend $42 on the Condor version of that that's the color that works, isn't two decades old, and where I can return it if there's problems.

Again, Condor is fine for 98% of the people shopping for this stuff.

Again, I think you're missing the part where I said that Condor is fine for people just getting into this.

Nobody gives a shit if the first piece of gear they buy is Berry compliant or not.

A lot of the older surplus doesn't use MOLLE as an attachment system, IE. There also tends to be more Velcro which isn't in and of itself bad but clapped out Velcro isn't particularly useful.

I'm not saying you can't get good condition surplus, I'm saying you're rolling the dice. I've gotten stuff that looks brand new and I've got stuff that was definitely a waste of money because of how worn it was.