The three year old Quest 3 is still the absolute best thing you can buy in this space in terms of value per dollar. Especially the color passthrough is a feature I found to enjoy quite a lot and it prevents me from even considering the new Steam Frame. After the price hike I think Meta might now sell roughly at break even or perhaps even with some tiny margins, but before it was definitely at a loss. If mine fell down and broke today, I'd probably buy it again in a heartbeat, even though I only use it semi-regularly like you.
Given the memory and general hardware shortages, I expected the price to be above $1200. Valve’s subsidy isn’t as high as Meta’s insane and aggressive hardware subsidies which is not the norm.
Still, you basically pay twice the price for finger and eye tracking and a slightly newer snapdragon with more RAM. Resolution, lenses, refresh rate are all basically equal and passthrough is way worse without the hardware upgrade.
