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RGM: Some of the best American watch making I am aware of.
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Roger W Smith: Absolutely top-tier watch making. It really doesn't get much better.
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Ulysse Nardin: They've got some uggos, but they've also got some really beautiful and/or interesting pieces. The Freak, Maxi Marine, and their perpetual calendars come to mind.
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Moritz Grossman: Very high quality German watches. I really like their power reserve indicators.
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Stowa: Known for their Flieger watches, but I think they have a very nice product lineup. I really like the look of their Prodiver dive watches.
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Laco: Another German brand known for their Flieger watches, but man, that Frankfurt GMT. It's probably a bit too large for my small wrist, but what a great looking GMT.
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Wempe: Another German brand. I really like their use of inner rotating bezels.
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Lang & Heyne: A more recent German brand with some absolute stunners.
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Mühle Glashütte: One more German brand that I think deserves to be better-known than they are.
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Credor: Grand Seiko is having a well-deserved moment. Now look at what Seiko is really capable of.
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Kurono Tokyo: Hajime Asaoka knows how to make a pretty watch. I would happily take nearly anything the brand makes.
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Minase: Another fantastic Japanese brand with a very attractive modern design language (in my opinion at least).
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Ming: Some of the best microbrand watches I have seen to-date.
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Casio Oceanus: Very high built quality, some very nice materials, such as Edo Kiriko Glass, and tons of useful functionality. I guess you could describe it as a classy G-Shock.
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Christiaan van der Klaauw: Gorgeous planetarium watches.
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Pierre DeRoche: Some of their stuff is a bit overstyled for me (mainly the TNT collection, despite the cool retrograde models), but there are a lot of models in the Grandcliff series that I really like.
Some others that I have already seen mentioned here plenty of times that I'll agree with (I think most of these are at least pretty well-known by watch lovers, while the ones I mentioned I think fly under the radar even within the hobby): Zenith, Oris, Nomos, Junghans, Glashütte Original, Damasko, Sinn, Breguet, Jaeger leCoultre, Universal Geneve, Ball, and Orient.
There have been plenty of news reports on this for many years. Lithium-ion battery failures are nothing new and everyone should be aware that they can happen. There's plenty of videos of exploding vapes, e-scooters, etc. They are rare, but they do happen. They're more likely to happen with very cheap products or with very cheap chargers (the chargers are a bit less likely because a good product should have over voltage and over current protection...or at least over current. These can happen from physical damage, shorts, manufacturing defects, water damage, etc.
Keep in-mind that the vast majority of consumer electronics with lithium ion batteries have off-the-shelf batteries that are not made by the brand of the actual device.
No brand is immune to this. Again, you don't typically need to worry, especially when buying decent-quality electronics, but everyone should be aware that this can happen.
Source: test engineer for a major gaming peripherals brand. I've seen a few of these myself on extremely rare occasion (they are treated extremely seriously as you can imagine).