I have been nearsighted my entire life. I recall not being able to see the blackboard in first grade. I wore glasses until age 16 when I got hard contacts, eventually got soft ones some years later. In my early 40s, as is common, I started needing reading glasses with the contacts, and my regular glasses became bifocals.
However, the last pair of glasses I got, sometime in the late '90s, were unusable because the eye doctor forgot to specify a "slab off" for the left lens, needed because of the extreme difference between the magnification for distance viewing, and the reading part. I paid $400 which was ludicrous. I should have tried to get the eye doctor to pay for the replacement, but I didn't. I just lived without regular glasses.
I started growing cataracts at a relatively early age, but they barely progressed for a couple of decades. Then suddenly there were noticeable changes in my vision and my current eye doctor said it was time for the surgery. I had some choices about lenses, one of which would have been what's called monovision, meaning one eye corrected for distance, the other corrected for reading. I'd tried that once with contact lenses and simply couldn't adjust. But a lot of lens wearers like that kind of correction. Perhaps for me part of the problem was that one eye was essentially twice as bad as the other, which probably made the monovision thing trickier.
So now, some seven years after the cataract surgery, while I still need reading glasses for reading or other close work, my distance vision is phenomenal. I feel as if I can read small signs on distant mountains. Apparently I had even better results than many people.
You might want to discuss with your doctor specifically what benefit you'd get from paying the more money. You have certainly heard both opinions here, but rather than go with whichever of the different stories seems more plausible, try to get exactly what your eye situation is and what would be improved for the more money.
Keep in mind that this is pretty much a one shot deal. There's really not an option to go back and replace lenses that aren't quite what you'd hoped.
I often say that cataracts were the very best thing that ever happened to my eyes. Just being able to open my eyes in the morning and see is astonishing and wonderful.
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