Spending more on knives

This question is getting its own thread because it is getting lost in the shuffle on the artisan/fusion question. I have an inexpensive Tojiro ITK gyuto and nakiri. They are shirogami white #2, have a hardness of 60, have inexpensive Wa handles and thin blades and are fairly light. Their designs are very conventional Japanese designs. They are kept extremely sharp with water stones and are used in a kitchen that is probably fairly typical, grounded in western cooking but with a fairly broad repertoire. There is plenty of slicing, dicing, mincing of vegetables and plenty of slicing and cubing of various proteins.

The question is: Is there any significant performance based reason to spend significantly more for visually similar knives?

I have never even held an expensive artisan made Japanese knife and while I am sure they are gorgeous and have refinements I wonder how the differences translate to working in the kitchen. Using the car analogy I can do things in the (fill in name of super car) that I just cannot do in a Civic. Are pricey Japanese knives that functionally different from my inexpensive ones?