Technical Madness

So I came into some extra money recently, and decided to buy a new DVD player to replace our current crappy one that not only makes too much noise (such awful whirring!) but also has no cover and generally performs badly.
Now since I fear obsolescence, I decided to buy a Blu-ray player, since you can play normal DVDs on a blue-ray and there's also some cool new features in these players (like downloading movies from Netflix rather than having them shipped in the mail). No problem, right? Wrong. I was completely unprepared for the sheer amount of technical gibberish that was thrown at me by the manufacturer, the resellers, and customer reviews. What I was looking for was a basic unit that would let me play DVDs, Blu-ray discs, and offer basic WiFi features; what I got was a bunch of confusing crap.
For those of you that care, I ended up going with the Sony BDP-S570. The Samsung equivalent sounded more intriguing, but it sounded like the WiFi was not built in – you needed to buy an additional WiFi stick of some kind, so the Sony won out.
However, read the initial customer review on the product’s Amazon page. Who are these people that have the time and money to try out multiple systems? And why can’t they explain their findings to someone who doesn’t know – and doesn’t really want to know –all of the technical details behind them?