Yeah .. the effects pedal world is a strange one .. on the one hand you have the WH stuff which is really only collectible/expensive because it's rare, but going for huge money (I'm pretty much certain I could never tell the difference in sound between a WH Aqua Puss and a DM-2). Then on the other hand you have, say, the Timmy .. a nifty little hand-made overdrive with great EQs, designed by the guy who builds Heritage amps .. and he sells them for US$100.
There was a recent blow-up lately on TGP about some new builder who took pre-orders for a bunch of overdrives/fuzzes in fancy boxes .. all the faithful piled in with their Paypal orders and then his delivery date got pushed back and back .. the weird thing, that no-one really seemed to pay any mind to, was that all the circuits were BYOC .. he claimed to have re-designed them but there were no sound clips, circuit photos or anything available .. so all these guys were kicking up a huge fuss about
painted boxes.
Every so often something really cool does come down the pike .. but mostly it's smoke and mirrors I reckon. Alien archaeologists are going to excavate our society in the future and discern that there was a religious sect founded around the mysterious ability of God to appear in many forms, celebrated by the worship of the myriad incarnations of the tube screamer circuit.

Distance-crunching honcho with echo unit.