Doc, I battled these same ideas. You take a block of briar, you battle it for ten hours, and out comes a pipe. Then someone says "It might be nicer if you did.... X" and for awhile I was like "No, this is MY pipe (my art), you don't tell me what's not good!". Then a few things happened. One is, I learned that if I made some subtle changes, my pipes sold. Always. So there's that. Whether we are catering to some generalized human judgment of beauty or just what pipe buyers expect, you meet those needs, you sell pipes.
The other idea is that, as you do more of this, you'll see certain tendencies in new pipe makers. Blobby heavy shaping, things that are maybe round here, square there (and not QUITE round and not QUITE square). I call these the "grade 8 shop project" pipes. Cuz that's what they look like. And you can make those and sell 'em for 80 bucks all day long. No one will pay 400 for one. No one.
Because somewhere along the way, the buyer is becoming educated about what makes a good pipe, a beautiful pipe, an exceptional pipe, a masterly pipe.
The little perfections of shaping, proportion, and execution are what does it.
We'll argue about these things, maker to maker, about little tiny subtly variations. But it's pretty clear to most of us, as we go along, what a graceful balanced shape is, vs the shop project shape. (Usually the difference is about 50 grams too
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NO ONE is saying "make pipes that look like this" - no one is trying to get anyone else to make indentical pipes or saying that there's some "right way" to go about being a pipe maker. Do whatever the hell ya like, there's lots of room in the market! But here, this board, anyhow, this is a place where we talk about making pipes that are as good as they can be, judged from various techinical and aesthetic grounds. We'll talk about those grounds all day long too. If you reach the pinnacle with your first pipe in grade 8.... this wouldn't be near as fun or challenging.