My approach is to buy top-of-the-line, pre-owned. That's why God created eBay and Craigslist.
Every piece of electronics I have on my boat was pre-owned (with the exception of an Airmar 1Kw transducer which I just purchased this week-- I had to buy new because once a thru-hull transducer is installed, not too many people are going to pull them out and sell them used for many years to come)
So when I say top-of-the-line, from my standpoint that phrase in the realm of marine electronics means "Furuno". You get a problem, you don't call the guy you bought the piece of equipment from. You call the Furuno customer service in Camas, WA. and they will walk you through every technical issue you could possibly come up with, whether the equipment was manufactured yesterday or 15 years ago
When I called Lowrance customer service back in the day I owned that brand, I was usually on hold for 45 minutes before I got to speak to a human and when I finally got one, as soon as he heard my equipment was 4 or 5 years old, he was telling me that I was wasting my time with it and I should consider buying new Lowrance equipment so my problem would go away....
I go out of my way to support the local guys. But an electronics shop in my neighborhood wanted $ 4,500 for a Furuno Navnet 3D MFD12. I ended up buying the same unit on The Hull Truth for $ 2,500 (new in box) That's a $ 2,000 savings (and it would have been 9% tax on top of that)
You have to ask yourself the following--- do I act like a charity and get beat up in order to support the local guy, or do I save some money and use those savings to buy my wife a dozen roses (every day of the week for the next month) ?