It's a brief and superficial blog post, but SOME of what they're talking about is pretty darn well determined - especially the bit about "satisficers" vs. "optimizers", that satisficers tend to be happier than optimizers, and that optimizers suffer from buyer's remorse; and satisficers tend to be content, and optimizers tend to spend more on replacement purchases. That's all pretty rock solid.
This is a forum chock full of optimizers of course, and while I accept the research that says what I just summarized, I don't know how much researchers look into comparison shopping/optimizing as it's own reward.
And I do believe that the sorts of people who populate forums like this (or any other hobby, really) are getting a lot out of the process. Look at the amount of traffic on the equipment forums vs. the "use of equipment" forums (the movie and music forums). The same is true for the astronomy forums I frequent: enormous amounts of thought and discussion on the trade-offs of different designs and brands of eyepieces, for example, dwarfing the amount of traffic of people actually talking about *observing*.