Tequila is great too - if you reddit, you should join the tequila subreddit. (And the bourbon and scotch subs [bourbon is really for all american whiskey]).
By the way, Tommy's in SF is the best tequila bar, ever. A flight of Tapatio, and a generous pour of chichicapa (mezcal), came out to $16 when I was last there. Fantastic place.
It is true, most new american whiskey on the market is simply bought from LDI or similar. Or it's aged in a way to make it browner quicker - hopefully just small casks and temperature controls causing large swings, but often much shittier methods (high pressure through oak, that sort of thing). Some distilleries are up-front with what they do and why - for example, great lakes distillery makes a very good but rather young whiskey - but most pretend to be something they're not. There are only several bottles selling over $50 that are any good. There are almost no new bottles selling over $30 that are worth the price. And sadly, my two favorites - old weller 107 and elmer t lee - are all but gone off the market, since they sell too damn fast, and I've only half a bottle of each left.
Thankfully, most 'artisinal' cocktails use reasonable liquor, not all the new garbage appearing on the shelves. Still, I can easily tell the difference between a cocktail made with a $10 bottle and a $25 bottle, but over $25, unless they do something crazy and use something BTAC or similar... eh, can't really tell the difference. Neat, I can tell what's what with no problem.
I've transitioned my home bourbon to old granddad 100 (bottled in bond.) Rittenhouse for rye. Both are $20 a bottle, and they're good for a cocktail. Even when I want to make it stronger with the OGD 114 instead of the 100, there's hardly any reason to use anything more expensive than $20-25 a bottle depending on the market and area (NYC pays more wholesale than I pay retail in California for example) unless burning money is part of the point, as opposed to an unfortunate side effect, when choosing american whiskey. (And if you put anything over $40-in-NYC a bottle of scotch into a mixed drink, fuck off with that shit.)
$25 a bottle means the drink shouldn't be more than $7 in standard bar terms, $10 if it's a bit stronger or fancier. I respect that they need to charge about 1/4 of the bottle per pour to make money, they have a lot of overhead. This is generally too rich for my blood and I make my own drinks at home and only pay 1/15 per pour. $22 though ... nah. Nope. You'd better be putting lagavulin 12 in the glass, and leaving out the rest of the ingredients, for $22 in a bar.