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Recently been down a rabbit's hole learning about how deep the waters are re: #SoySauce in #Taiwan and it's been fascinating.
Terminology! Soy sauce made with black beans (apparently the traditional method going back to way back when) is called something different than the stuff made from soybeans and what.
I'd tell y'all which is which but I haven't sorted it out yet myself.
Methods! Some companies buy "bean juice" and then process. Some go from bean to sauce. This matters for pricing.
When I say "matters for pricing", I mean: when a company sells a 500 ml bottle of sauce for 320 NT (around 10 USD), they should deffo be doing the traditional everything from whole bean to fermenting in big clay urns to saucing themselves instead of purchasing tanks of "bean juice" from companies you turned your nose up at to buy from them instead.
The deep waters are here:
There are a lot of soy sauce brands with no production lines. And lots with production lines but no fermentation grounds.
And since 99% of whether a soy sauce is any good has to do with how it's fermented, what they fermented, and how long it's fermented...
Purchasing basic bean ferment from a company that sells their sauce for 50 NTD per bottle and then selling your bottles for 320 is some kind of ???.
Because if you're claiming the end result is the same, what's the point?
What's also interesting here is that Taiwanese soy sauce is apparently different from almost everywhere else in the world, which explains why it was so hard to find soy sauce I liked when in the US and why recipes from Mainlanders call for types of sauce you can't casually find on the market here.
According to one article, Taiwanese sauces tend towards the sweet. Which is a major difference.
Like using port for coq au vin versus a burgundy.
Something else that came up which I find interesting and which I'd love to have #historians chime in on:
#Taiwan 醬油 or bean sauce, was historically made with black beans, the way they did it in China when the Chinese colonizers came over during the Ming dynasty.
Then the Japanese took over, and suddenly production shifted radically to the soybean+wheat combo we most commonly see today.
Articles differ as to the reasons why.
#colonization
TBH I'm not sure how much of "the Japanese started mass production of wheat-soy sauce because they hated the taste of our traditional bean sauce and nearly caused the demise of our cultural heritage" is "storytelling meant to sell products by prompting nationalist fervor" or just a particular slant because certain other articles indicate the shift was in large part because wheat-soy sauce uses a fraction of the fermentation time of black bean sauce and much less labor.
What is absolutely true is that black beans have a very aggressive flavor.
The use of "aggressive" was by an article talking about how colonization ruined everything, btw, but I'm using it here because I agree that black beans are not exactly shy and retiring flavorwise.
What's also true is that fermented black beans & black bean paste is used widely in Chinese cuisine even though bean sauce itself is mostly now soy sauce.
However, it seems it hasn't caught on in Japan, unlike other things. 
Back to wheat-soy sauce.
There are two main ways of producing this:
the traditional way, starting with whole beans and fermenting in vats, whether it's under the sun or in precisely controlled environs...
or, as I call it, the carcinogenic method via acid-hydrolyzation of vegetable protein (usually the leftovers from soybean oil extraction).
This, by the way, is why my grandmother said to beware of cooks who buy gallon jugs of sauce for a dollar.
I don't think she knew that acid-hydrolyzed soy sauce had carcinogens in it, but certainly I haven't come across a cheap soy sauce that had any kind of depth and nuance to it.
Not that "more expensive is better" here, as with all things.
Unfortunately, as said in the opening post: the waters run deep.
Some sauces are just expensive without the corresponding labor and methods. All marketing budget, shall we say.