Sorry you bought crap furniture when you were first married, I can't help that.
(the wife and I decided early on not to buy good furniture, until we were done having children in the house. We love them, but the little house apes are the death of any kind of "fine" finish or appearance. And, interestingly enough, when the kids had grown enough that we could have gotten nice things, having those nice things was no longer very important to us.)
But, I think you are making an assumption that isn't exactly true. About the ammo crates being "throw away", intentionally.
I think it is a combination of multiple "mindsets", the US and Germanic have a number of points of congruence, but also a number of points of difference.
Two of them are (when making things for German use) to make them the best way they can, and to make them reusable. This is a combination of "old world craftsmanship" and tradition, as well as design and use philosophies.
Yes, the box is clearly overbuilt (by our standards) for a single use item. The very fact that it has hinges shows it was made for reuse. Single use boxes have lids that are nailed on.
Many German made things are built to allow reuse, despite the fact that many do get thrown away, WWII German machineguns did not use disintegrating link belts. Ammo belts, ammo cans, shipping crates, and many other things were intended to be collected and reused, whenever practical. And, sometimes, they actually were.
Different attitudes, lots of places. There's the story about an American buying a German sports car, and complaining to the dealer about the lack of cup holders...the German dealer's response was "das Auto is fur DRIVING, not fur drinking!"....
One "attitude /design philosophy" very common in Germanic firearms is that the safety is to be operated with the non-trigger hand. Another seems to be that pistol holsters are gun cases that you can wear, fastened with straps and buckles, and not well suited to rapid deployment of the gun.
Quite different from American attitudes, and while newer German designs do show some influence from American attitudes, tradition still hold sway with some things.
"The customer is always right" is not a typical German attitude. There are, of course, exceptions..