Be careful what you wish for: generating a diversity of ever-better options for the savvy consumers is at least partially subsidized with the margins extracted from inattentive 'casual' consumers. Reduce those margins, and it's possible that the prices paid by savvy shoppers could go up, and the pace of innovation -- exploring the technology/marketing solution space -- go down.
But the direction/efficiency of innovation would improve. Better to spend money that encourages companies to research more genuinely useful products rather than products that simply may be more marketable because they have a useless extra 2 megapixels.
I would be more confident of your prediction if there were some suppliers/retailers that only sold the high-margin items with "overpriced" bells and whistles. But there aren't: the exact same companies that produce and retail the "good" "valuable" products also make money from related high-margin products for naive and price-to-value-oblivious consumers. And these high-margin products help pay for some of the same shared research/design/marketing costs as support high-value/low-margin products for savvy buyers.
If the article author's goals are met -- the casual consumers now "overpaying" are directed to cheaper products they'll be just as happy with -- the thing you can be sure of is that industry margins will go down. Lower-margin industries have fewer upstarts and slower product cycles, so the idea that "the direction/efficiency of innovation would improve" is dubious at best.