That's the rub for me. How do I know it's not been drenched with a neurotoxin, had mites, or spores or who knows what crazy grow bro science people come up with. So even if I paid more it's worth it to me because I know it's clean.
I worked at a legal medical farm that grew specifically for distillation. I can verify, corporate cannabis CAN be very very ugly. I won't touch the dispensary products in my area anymore and had to rebuild my black market connections after personally experiencing how gross corporate weed can be. Fun sidenote, growing someone elses shitty weed makes your homegrow go to ass when you're too damned tired to take care of your own plants.
I worked at 1 out of the 15 or so grows in the state, but I have little reason to believe that the standards increase at any of the other companies or facilities. Then there's the fact that the plants that we grew at the farm had a farm manager overseeing individual growers who oversaw the general aspects of their assigned rooms. Then there was a team for fertilization, team for de-leafing and training, a team for pest management, and we supposedly had a facilities management cleaning team but I'll be damned if ever saw them. Too many hands of too many people doing too many things and not communicating effectively.
Endless powdery mildew and botrytis, then there were the beneficial bugs we put on everything, which we often killed with chems that we were using to try and control the pests the benificials didn't get, which in turn brought more mold. My state's concepts of standards and corporate regulation are f'n comical and far far lower than my personal standards.
As I interviewed to change from pest control to something else I casually mentioned that I had stopped trusting anyone else to grow my weed, my interviewer replied, "That's smart."
I grow because I love doing it and I don't trust anyone else. Half the people I worked with at the "professional" grow couldn't successfully convert 1 fluid ounce into ml without a calculator and measurement chart. That would have been my first standard for hiring would be understanding how measurements work. Corporate standards are for shit and I begrudgingly accept industrial pharmaceuticals and food products as it is, but I won't eat at a restaurant anymore and I won't smoke corporate weed. Having worked in industrial food-service and corporate weed, I don't trust either of those industries at all anymore.
Corporate cannabis isn't in the business to grow weed, they're in the business to make money. The rich assholes at the top don't give a shiat about quality, all they care is how much they can fleece from the customers while spending smaller and smaller fractions of a penny per plant.