Some me interesting replies, my OP was in fact about what some have mentioned here, homages are absolutely fine in most cases and like I said I have owned some of the better watches based around a famous design.

What I was getting at is that there is a trend of homage in recent times that is identical to the original watch bar the makers/company text, same polished center links, same colour, same bezel/font - everything!

To me this is too far and brings homage and fake much closer together, this isn’t inspired design it’s just a blatant copy of the original in every way with a tiny name change on the dial to not infringe copyright.