When “high design” isn’t.

Working with designers has made me an amateur design snob. I have opinions on logos, fonts, product design, color palettes, and sundry other things I probably have no legitimate reason to have an opinion on. So, at the risk of sounding like a total jerk, I’m going to offer up my opinion on the following product: 

This, my friends, is not high design. This looks cool, I’ll grant you that. But this is a) something that has existed for quite some time, b) offers no improvement on the already existing versions of this, and c) is something you could make using supplies found at a local craft store. Am I saying you have to make something brand new and that it can’t come from a craft store in order for it to be well-designed? No. But it DOES need to offer an improvement, or at least something unique. This does nothing unique or interesting. And yet, it was featured on a fairly prominent design blog, notcot.org. 

Why? Why does something like this get categorized as high design? I’m asking seriously; I really can’t figure it out. This is wooden beads and dowel rods put into a simple wooden box and sold for $80. The only difference between this and some other molecule kits out there is the box. Packaging, while often an interesting aspect of a product, is not the product itself. 

So tell me, am I wrong? Is this, in fact, very well designed and even notable? Or is this just design snobbery gone too far?