LOL. I'm not sure who's 'going at who' here - I'm certainly not and I'd have thought a thread on wildlife advice was as good a place for gimbal advice as anywhere.
Without a doubt- after a decent long lens, a gimbal head - pretty well any gimbal head - will make the biggest difference to your shots and probably increase your hit rate more than anything else, but he choices on the market can be a bit bewildering when you don't know much about them.
Jeremy's Lensmaster looks OK and a big plus is that it has a proper ball race for smooth panning movement and no play which is very important. The Manfrotto 393 doesn't have a ball race and it's one it's weaker points although it's very good in other areas. The weak point of the Lensmaster and many others s that it only supports the lens from a pivot point on one side, so the weight isn't acting down through the centre of the tripod. This is no problem as long as you take a proper engineering solution to address the shortcomings of this design. Whether it's a steel or alloy just bending a piece of metal to right angles isn't the elegant answer and is obviously a lot to do with the price of this gimbal.
The Jobo gimbal I bought recently addresses the problem seriously as you can see...
Jobo gimbal by
tonky8203, on Flickr
The Wimberley which is just about the most expensive on the market approaches the problem with a similar solution, but when you start to look at the tooling costs involved you can see how prices soon start to head Northwards.
I rate this gimbal better than the Dietmar Nill I have which is actually more expensive so I agree with Jeremy that dearer doesn't necessarily mean better, but you can't realistically ignore the fact that at the low end of the gimbal market there is a price to be paid in build quality which ultimately means stability.. How much you want to pay will depend on how serious you are, and how much of your hard earned lolly you want to part with, but choose carefully and try to just do it once - it's cheaper in the end.
That adjustable mount height on the Jobo is the first gimbal I've had with this function and it makes a huge difference to balancing lenses of various weights optimally for ease of use. I regularly use the 500mm, 300mm and 70-200 so this is a very useful feature for me. Basically, the heavier the camera/lens combo the higher it needs to be raised.
