Rustle agrees with me! Must be my birthday... actually my birthday was last week, so something else must be going on here
There is an absolutely vast range of headsets. Crudely speaking, and ignoring pricing, they fall into two categories:
1. Those that clamp your head pretty firmly, and after a few hours you really feel it, and some of them, like the top-end D-C models and some others, are very good
2. The Bose X, which can be worn for (in my experience) over 6 hours without the slightest discomfort. It's passive attenuation is not that bad; it's about comparable to the usual sh*tty flying school headset. It is certainly usable with a duff battery, but anybody used to it will notice the huge difference instantly.
Whether 1. matters is a matter of budget. A lot of people say they can't fly for more than an hour or two because of fuel or bladder limitations, but the latter is easily taken care of with a little plastic bottle (with some additional considerations for the gurls
) and that transforms the sort of trips one can do, and one's enjoyment of flying. So I wouldn't skimp on the headset for flight duration reasons alone.
The point about hearing damage is a very good one too. The stuff about the man with a Porsche is bo11ocks. This is your hearing. Look at the average old airline pilot: deaf as a wooden post. And a decent D-C is priced pretty close to a Bose anyway.