I see my mistake…I saw one whose thumbnail pic looked like the Snowflake and is over $10K. You are correct at the $7K number. Still kicking myself.
And yeah…the costs get stupid pretty fast. Again, view most watches as jewelry and assess from that perspective. If all you want to do is know what time it is then you can do that for near free these days (cell phones are not free but you are paying for it to be a phone and not a watch so it telling you the time might be considered a freebie that comes with the phone).
For the most part, the automatic winding works on a modern movement is essentially just an additional module that gets added to a base movement, meaning that the manual wind and the automatic wind versions of a particular movement have the exact same almost the same going train.* And an 18 hour power reserve would be shockingly poor performance in any case.
From the Longines FAQ…
The average automatic watch is usually endowed with approximately 36 to 48 hours of power reserve. The majority of the automatic watches from Longines offer an average 64 hours of power reserve.
My worst automatic is a 42 hour reserve and my best is a 72 hour reserve. There are some relatively modest watches (relatively speaking, it’s still a luxury market good) that take that to 7 to 10 days.
*A manual wind and an automatic wind movement will have slightly different mainspring barrels. A manual wind watch hits a definite stop, where an automatic has a mainspring that can slip but continue to turn when max wind is achieved.