Good god, 400 dollars on sheets? I use 20 dollar sheets.
But then again, I do like hospital blankets…
Use them instead of keeping them in the closet? 
Seriously, I usually wash mine and put them right back on the bed. At most I alternate between two sets. So they see a lot of use.
There might be some confirmation bias going on with regard to your 25 year old sheets too. I have some towels that are older than that and they look practically brand-new, but that doesn’t mean anything except that they’re weird mutant towels that don’t age.
I’ve bought them for the kids’ beds and hate them. Admittedly this might be because they weren’t high-end, but they shrank horribly. The top sheet barely fit after a washing. And I don’t like having something with that much of a friction component.
Though I admit in a cold room, they might feel warmer than woven, that’s what heavy blankets (and husbands) are for.
Smooth woven sheets for me!
And this is timely - we need to get a new set.
What is the difference between Egyptian cotton and regular cotton? Can’t just be that it’s grown in Egypt, can it?
I like low thread count too. High thread count sheets, in my limited experience, feel slick to me, not soft. Cheap, worn cotton feels best to me.
We inherited a set of sheets from my sister-in-law when they gave us their queen bed; at the time we just had a full and they were upgrading to a king. Those were the best sheets. They had, I don’t know, some weight to them, or something; when you laid in bed they draped themselves over you in kind of a soft, form-fitting way. I used to love walking into the bedroom when my wife was already in bed because I loved how they conformed to her body.
Eventually they fell apart. We replaced them with 600tc sheets, thinking the higher tc the better- they sucked. They were stiff, almost like a big sheet of paper. I hated them. Now we’re just using some run-of-the-mill sheets, nothing special, but I’d love to find a pair like the ones we used to have.
But now I’m thinking it’s not so much the thread count, but the finish or type of cotton. We have to do some experimentation.
Count me in as someone who likes nice quality sheets, I couldn’t tell you the threadcount, but I know it when I feel it.
You can often find nice quality sheets on overstock.com, sometimes there is not a great selection of colors though.