Hi mrmusic88,
Yes … 2.17 lb polyfoam is a high quality polyfoam.
This is for each person to decide for themselves. Each person may have a different method of “scoring” based on all the objective, subjective, and intangible factors that are involved in any final decision. My role is to help you reach a point where you have eliminated all the worst options and are choosing between “good and good” which you’ve done. At this point it would be difficult to make a “mistake” in terms of quality or value. As I mentioned … “commodity value” is just part of the picture and like buying a car or even ordering a meal at a restaurant it may not be possible or even meaningful to narrow down the "cost’ of every component to decide which one has the best “commodity value” or “raw material” value and make a decision based on that alone. This just isn’t a practical way to decide which one you would be happiest with.
I can’t answer this for someone else. When you are purchasing online part of the risk that you are taking on is that you can’t test the mattress ahead of time but part of the benefits are that you often have the ability to exchange layers and can also test similar materials locally so that you have a sense of what you are buying. As you can see in post #2 here it took me two weeks of “agonizing” over smaller and smaller (and probably meaningless) details to make a final choice. This is a good sign that you have great final choices available. One of the benefits of a site like this is that you have access to a large number of great choices and can eliminate the worst ones so you have no “bad” choices left. This puts you in an enviable position compared to most other consumers that are shopping for a mattress who often end up choosing between “bad and worse”.
The challenge of a site like this is that having so many choices can make it more difficult to decide which one is “best for YOU” and narrow your options down to one. Only you though, in combination with your conversations with each manufacturer and looking carefully at all the options that each one makes available before, during, and after the purchase can help you decide which of the objective, subjective, an intangible factors and tradeoffs are most important to you.
Phoenix