Funny, the first name that springs to my mind when I hear mass-produced in a watch context is... Rolex. All estimates of course, but ~2000 watches a day is almost 3/4 million watches every year. Does that make them mall fodder too? :)

We might not like quartz all the time, but it helped keep the manufacturers alive and managed not to kill off mechanical watches in the end. And what could the alternative outcome have been? There's always a need for a bottom end - we would probably have seen a lot of consolidation of manufacturers and the cheapest powered by truly gruesome mechanical movements like the EB 8420 that "graced" the Easy Riders.

Would that really have been any better than a quartz bottom end of the market?

And even Heuer in its classic phase produced some of its renowned "series" watches with quartz movements. Are these still Carreras, despite being quartz?

Heuer says yes, and I am inclined to agree. And they are actually much harder to find than an 1153 too. Or a 2447.

So quartz is a swings and roundabouts thing. We might not always like it, but there are some worthwhile quartz watches. Some of the high end watch houses will even relieve you of many tens of thousands of pounds/dollars/Euros for a watch with a quartz movement. In the end, it has its place right?