This thread has gone a bit sideways (as expected considering the audience, yours truly included... to a degree), but as a somewhat serious reply I submit the following:
One can easily go play a round of golf (and better than I ever could in my wildest dreams) with a $200 set of clubs picked up a Costco or even at the local Goodwill. Yet there are people happily spend two and three times that much for a single driver from Calloway or Ping.
It's a golf club. A tool with which to play a game. It does the same job as the full set they could have purchased for a fraction of that.
But why? Prestige? The name? The answer to those questions are up to the end-user, and no-one else.
So why to we play micro-stakes games with sets that cost many hundreds or thousands of dollars? The answer to that question is also up to the user and no-one else.
The fact there is a discussion forum that caters to the people who spend that kind of money on nothing more than those specific tools to play a game in itself should answer your question.
We all put different monetary values on the tools we play our games with. Some are happy with their Costco specials (few and far between here) while others cherish their custom-fitted Ping's despite their 18 handicap.
For myself, I'm effectively content with my sets... all of which see play (not so much the last couple years for obvious reasons). My standard game is nickel/dime blinds, $20 max buy-in, yet I have nearly 20,000 chips across nine different sets and many thousands of dollars invested.
I have spent significantly more money on these than I expect to see in returns from my games... ever. I had them made, and hunted to build those sets because they made me happy and I enjoy being able to have the folks at my game get to play with the Calloway's despite us all having multi-digit handicaps.
(as a P.S. and hinted at by
@doublebooyah85, if you aren't going the custom chip route, it's incredibly hard to see fractional chips from retired casinos as they just don't spread games that require chips that we would use in a quarter/half blinds game. If you are trying to build a tournament set that needs $1k or greater chips, good luck as most casinos don't need many chips of those higher values. Put the two together and unless you are making a cash set that has 1/1 or 1/2 blinds, you are seeking chips that are scarce and in high demand to start with.)