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I believe +2-3 seconds a day accuracy for a mechanical watch is great. That means you are within a minute a month which should be fine for most people. On the other extreme of what the manufacturer allows, 20 seconds a day means your watch is over two minutes off each week or 9 minutes off in a month. If you only reset your watch when you reset the calender window each month, your watch is off a lot by the time you reset it. I think is that is unacceptable, especially in an age when we have come to expect more from a $10 quartz watch.
Forgetting about quartz watches which are made by machines and are inherently more uniform, my complaint is that manufacturers are not regulating every 2824-2 movement to the same standards. Maybe they are but the limits that manufacturers accept as allowable standards are far looser that what they could be. Certainly there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the movement's design that every 2824-2 movement couldn't be regulated to within 2-3 seconds per day. Perhaps it takes more time to regulate it correctly than to regulate it incorrectly, but is that really so labor intensive in a new watch that it couldn't be done? Admittedly a Limes Nightflight 2 watch for $295 is a mechanical watch bargain today, but why should one sample operate within COSC standards and another be 20 sec off. You pay your money and take a chance if accuracy is important to you.
Is is only because some of us as consumers say we don't care what we get in terms of accuracy that the manufacturer's follow suit and don't make the effort to regulate them more alike. Or do people buy watches more as jewelry than as a timekeepers? If we all marvel at the complexity and human workmanship in a mechanical watch, shouldn't we marvel also that they are regulated as well as they are could be? Otherwise we could be buying mechanical "widgets" that have many wheels that turn and look nice but don't do anything.
To put it another way, if you were buying a new car, and your new car ran sluggish and seemed like it needed a tune-up on the day you took it home, would you be happy? Would you rationalize that at least it looks nice and smells nice, and not care that it didn't drive as well as the test car you tried? I doubt it.
