there are an ungodly number of compromises in the composition of the kit. we went back and forth for more than a month on which bits would go into the kit, adding and deleting small things that we thought we might be able to cut.
it is true that the tools in the kit are, for the most part, uncompromising for their purpose. the cl1481 is an ideal fixed temperature iron at 110v for leaded soldering and unleaded desoldering. the larsen nippers are simply some of the best money can buy (although they are coming in at a STEEP discount in this kit, and had they not been so relatively inexpensive, they would have been cut), and the soldapullt is a no-brainer.
many people are only seeing the purchase price without looking at the items that come in the kit. the compromises were all in the form of _functionality_ and not quality or, most importantly, safety. to take a random example, we could have included a cupped soldasip tip for swipe soldering of SMT components. However, that is not the point of the kit. The kit's purpose is to help the user understand the use of leaded solder and the effect of tip size, cleanliness and contact surface area as it relates to the quality and ease of creating solder joints. The goal was to make it most useful for DIP soldering and wire joint soldering, with some small work in the form of large passive SMT devices: the conical tip and blunt-nose tweezers cover that functional range specifically, but could have been cut for cost.
in the final decisions that were made, I looked at the highest volume electronics kits on both massdrop and across the internet. on massdrop, by far the biggest DIY segment is the mechanical keyboard segment. that means soldering DIP switches and large SMD diodes. it means doing some large hookup wire work on USB cables. the kit makes the compromises needs to cover these functional ranges, but tries not to stray too far from that. you're not going to be soldering 400A cup joints, and you're not going to be doing 160 pin qfnp chips. but thru-hole passives, hookup wire, and SMD with big components and big solder pads will become your bread and butter if you learn the tools in this kit.
i also tried to be somewhat forward thinking. audio equipment is a very large segment of massdrop and how i first encountered analog circuits that i couldn't just breadboard my way around. diy audio is currently in a sad state of affairs. the simplest, most effective opamp circuits are soldered poorly with substandard, often counterfeit parts in shenzhen, and paid forum users rave about intangible qualities of their output that can't be proven or disproven. there is a "fog of war" in modern electronics. most of the time, they work, but no one knows why. learning to solder is the first step towards lighting a path through the fog. learning is a lot easier when you have help.
