glad you decided to stay

regarding the memory, well for high end memory you usually only pay for 3 things:
1. service+support
2. nice heatspeaders
3. guarantee for high clockspeeds/tight timings

if you know what chips to look for you can usually get close to the same results, sometimes even better, by grabbing a kit of value memory with the same chips.
BUT, the main reason the cheap crucial stuff does well is cause its newer... the other kits are older, and the recent d9gtr chips from micron are getting better while the other mem was probabaly made in a time where there were no good gtr chips around or there were no gtr chips available whatsoever