Regarding tools - All the action is in the building trades tools. The cordless stuff is otherworldly in variety and quality. Everything is made for the mobile tradesman, and everything in that world is much, much better than it used to be. Drive-bits, cordless pin-guns, everything. It's great and getting better by the day. Go to a construction jobsite and look for a corded tool - it'll be a rotary hammer. Everything else is cordless. The cordless framing gun is coming. It might take a while, but it'll come.
As mentioned, mechanic's tools are becoming less and less a thing, as less and less people actually work on machines. Nobody I know (who isn't a professional dealership mechanic) buys Snap-On or Mac hand tools because (as Gordon correctly points out) they cost 4-5 x what a set of Craftsman or Kobalt tools does, and they don't last 4-5x as long.
I've got 2 of the biggest socket/combination wrench sets Craftsman makes, but I only bought them because I like to have all of the wrenches and sockets of the same make, if possible. Out on the trucks, I don't care - because we lose them there, and we piece together sets from other incomplete sets in the shop. I do the same thing with my Speedster travel-tools.
It's been a long, long time since I broke a socket or combination wrench from any manufacturer, though. Ratchets, yes - but I've always been doing something outside design when they broke. The days of rebuilding them are over, but I replace them with 3 or 4 of the best teardrop ratchet I can find for a normal price. Stanley made one that was excellent quality, before they became NLA. I like to keep sockets of the same brand, but my theory on ratchets is that I've never opened the socket drawer and thought - I'm so glad I only have one 3/8 drive ratchet.
Like most things, more is more. More ratchets is a great thing.
I end up with a lot of incomplete wrench/socket sets, because when you lose tools out on the truck, and the choice is to buy a single 5/8" combination wrench from Ace for $12 or a whole set from HF for $20, the choice isn't hard. I like saving the incomplete sets for "special" tools - you know, the 13 mm combination wrench ground down because it didn't fit in a certain spot unless you ruined a wrench to do it. That fella' is definitely a Pittsburg HF wrench from an incomplete $19.99 set (the one missing the 10 mm or the 1/2").
Running counter to most guys' thinking - I'm glad/sad that HF is moving upscale. In one way, it's nice that they've got some stuff approaching professional level, but you can't buy individual sockets and wrenches, so I wonder what you're supposed to do when the 10mm socket goes missing. OTOH, the world needs crappy tools, like the sets that Japanese motorcycles used to supply or what HF used to be - super-cheap throwaways for places where the quality really doesn't matter.
The thing I feel most strongly about is keeping tools. Giving them away or selling them is just foolish. How is a man supposed to fix or do anything at all manly without tools?