At the risk of getting laughed out of the room…
I use an ancient Weller Ungar 921ZX for which I managed to score some fine tips at the last minute before they became unobtainium. It has a slider to adjust the temperature. The numbers may or may not mean anything in real life, I just know which positions work for me for which use-cases. I have no idea what “profiles” and soldering irons have to do with one-another :-). So far I have not found that the soldering iron is my limiting factor in working on 0.5mm pitch SMDs or 0402’s.
I do miss not having a tip that turns off as soon as I put it into the holder and comes back up instantaneously, but that’s pretty standard these days as far as I can tell. A tweezer “tip” also looks very interesting. If someone gifted me a $400+ soldering station I’m sure I’d love it. But if I’m turning a couple $100 bills around my fingers… not sure that’s where I would spend those.
To stay on soldering irons for a minute, I have a propane-powered soldering iron. It can turn any SMD part into a puff of smoke within seconds :-), but it comes in really handy if you want to tin some 10ga stranded copper wire or solder to a thick solid copper bus bar. The above Weller need not apply, dunno how the $400+ irons fare (and whether you’d want to use them on such often messy stuff). I also just ordered a PineCil, which I hope to use when I’m out in the field trying to repair something. My point here is that it’s worth considering whether an extra $200 are best spent on the fanciest soldering station or on multiple tools…
I also use a sub-$100 WEP 858D hot air station. It allows me to do work that no iron allows me to do. Would a >$200 hot air station do better: I sure hope so, but I don’t know how often it would have made a difference. I believe that my skills at putting down the right amount of paste, or being able to tell in which state the solder is are bigger limiting factors for me than the tool…
So overall, I would say that if I were to go shopping for soldering tools with a $400-$500 budget I’d come back with multiple reasonably-priced tools as opposed to a $4xx soldering station… With the caveat that if I were to do soldering for hours daily I would have to consider a higher budget and buy top products!
NB: I do appreciate the high-end discussion here, it lets me know what I’m missing
