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S-tier is reserved for the absolute workhorses of analytical chemistry—IR, GCMS, XRF, SEM, and MALDI-TOF. These are the instruments that make you look like a genius when they actually work, and cost more than a small house when they break.
Then we've got A-tier with LCMS and Nanodrop, which are still incredibly powerful but somehow slightly less glamorous. B-tier features the reliable middle children: HPLC, NMR (which honestly deserves higher but probably got downgraded for making chemists wait 3 hours for a spectrum), pH meter, DSC, MTP reader, flow cytometry, and ICP-MS.
C-tier is where things get spicy—UV-VIS, GC, and literally just "Smell" as an analytical technique (which, let's be real, organic chemists rely on way too much). Also TLC, AAS, and CE are here, probably because they're effective but nobody's writing home about them.
F-tier? Just titration. Sitting alone in analytical chemistry jail. The disrespect is palpable, considering titration is what got most of us through freshman chemistry. But compared to shooting lasers at samples or ionizing molecules, yeah, manually dripping liquid from a burette does feel a bit medieval.
