Seiko are resting on their laurels. They appear busy because they're churning out watch after watch after watch but really they're just rehashing the same recipes with varying degrees of success.
I like Seiko, I really do, I've had dozens of them and I still have the orange Monster that pulled me into all this watch nonsense but over the past few years, prices have gone up and up and quality has hovered around the mediocre. Yeah, they're good, but they're not great, not as great as they think they are.
Are they still a value proposition? Yeah, maybe, if you're comparing them to Swiss brands, but for me they no longer represent the value they did.
The brand feels muddled to me right now too. I used to love that they had every base covered from £50 to several thousand, but now it's a new variant of every model every bloody week, it's just overwhelming. I can only come to the conclusion that this is related to the QC issues.
So, they're not cheap anymore, they're not better than their competitors and the range is just too big. Apart from that, everything is rosy.