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On gloves, I look at the thickness of leather in contact points and stitching. Some gloves have folded over hidden stitching which is nice. The material of thread used is important and I don't like the nylon thread used in gloves. I'll re-inforce it myself with kevlar thread.
The palms I think are most important as all my crashes have chewed up palms on gloves. I lament the neglect and movement away from palm protection. I used to buy gloves with metal studs on palms to lengthen slide time before penetration. Can't find those any more.
Note that all the above design elements doesn't change production costs very much. Kevlar thread's higher cost over nylon is minimal compared to total materials or cost in machinery and labour. Placing armour on palms cost no different than putting it on sides of fingers or over fingernails. You want to buy based upon construction variables and not use retail-pricing as measurement of protection.
It's similar to the Pentium-4. Consumers just didn't understand how CPUs work so the only metric they really understood was clock-speed (Mhz), higher is better right? Intel just stripped out the CPU to increase clock-speed as much as possible and sold a lot of P4s because it was higher-speed than P-III and therefore that must be better right? Unfortunately, in terms of real throughput, a P4 needs to be twice the clock-speed of P-III to do same work, especially in floating-point operations. But hey, higher-numbers mean better.
The Core architecture to replace P4 was based on older P-III. Able to do twice as much work at 1/2 the mhz (a 1.8ghz Core-Solo was faster than 3ghz P4). By this time, consumers were more sophisticated and was able to understand that there's more than just mhz involved.
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