When well-meaning fools lament the plethora of choices we have in a free market society, they make a crucial mistake. They ignore the necessary condition for which those choices emerge and simply assume a result.
I can imagine a very well constructed study done that proves, truly proves in a way that most all could agree, that ~99% of why a consumer chooses A versus B comes down to irrational affiliations or random luck. For example the determination of what car one chooses to buy between a Honda Accord and a very similar Toyota Camry would be shown to be nothing more than stuff like a person's prior cars happened to be Hondas or their parents bought Hondas or they buy the car they last saw an ad for or their favorite color is red and the car the dealer first showed them was red, etc.
The incorrect conclusion a well-meaning fool might jump to is that we have unnecessary redundancy in our free market economy. We should stop wasting resources on the competition because the differences between these artificial choices are illusory. Just build the Acamry and be done with it!
The fact that there are minor, subtle, and hidden differences between all such choices are lost on those drawing such conclusions. But more importantly they are making a dangerous mistake to neglect how we got to the magnificent state of the world where we have such amazing choices that a purchase decision settled by a coin flip likely leaves the consumer equally well off.
There are no instructions from the universe for how to build the optimal mass-consumer sedan. We need a process to discover this and continually rediscover and improve upon the outcome. We need the right incentives to reward incremental success, punish incremental failure, and fully stop efforts going down a bad path. The capitalist free market is this process. It is the sine qua non for progress--as broadly defined as one can imagine it.
PS. Or maybe this is optimal?
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