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It's just a dedicated bowl & heating element, plus a fancy feature or two (mine has "smart steam" to set a time to steam which only starts counting down when boiling temperature is reached), right? What makes this a $120 purchase?
While the cheap rice cookers make it soft to eat, the texture and flavor are not nearly as nice. Light fluffy rice that tastes great is much better than the rice that comes out of the $10~30 rice cookers. Forget steamers unless you like mushy rice with no texture and very little flavor. Fuzzy logic rice cookers bring out flavors in rice that many people never experience in their lifetimes while wasting money on great rice that is basically wasted in a cheap rice cooker.
I did a google search for "fuzzy logic" following your reply, SidPost, and I see now /how/ a rice cooker could be better than another.
The thing is, rice cooking doesn't have absolute values for the "rice + water + heat + time" algorithm. The type of rice, the amount of water, the temperature before and (therefore) during cooking, and the duration of cooking can all change.
While I'm sure no rice cooker will start with the "theory of everything" and make perfect rice every time, the simplest cookers will do very set actions, i.e. cook rice for X minutes using whatever heating element is built in.
Upon further inspection, my Aroma ARC-3000SB with "Micom Sensor Logic" does have a computer chip for improving the quality yield of rice. How that compares to anything else more or less expensive, I don't know. My cooker was around half the price of this drop. I got my cooker from Costco. The manual PDF I found online (since I misplaced the physical, paper one) appears to be very detailed and appreciates a good effort toward getting good results.
That said, I just realized the unit I have has a broken plastic lid lock, so I can no longer pick it up by the handle when it's "closed" (because it will just open the lid). According to the manual I'm looking at a $22.00 S&H charge (likely a minimum) to return the item for fixing if that's how that will go. Paying $22 to fix a ~$50 unit seems a bit unnecessary. I'll probably just deal with it for a long time. Maybe I'll try to find a unit with a metal lock for my next purchase.
Many thanks for motivating me to learn more about what makes a cooker worth its weight in rice!