I can't speak for her but my guess is she'd say at some point, even if debeers started it, its not about debeers anymore. Or she'd say something like why do we value the art we do? Isn't it all socially shaped? At what point does it become personal? If she wants a diamond because that's what she had in mind, and what her parents and grandparents had, and she likes the color and brilliance, what the hell does debeers have to do with it? Couldn't people still want white diamonds even if you could dig them up in your backyard?

It's not really bullshit to want something but wrestle with the ethics of it, or to balance different options. Like I said, she probably would have went with a repurposed stone or none if we exhausted other options.

Moissonite for her was this thing she had never heard of, something that didn't have meaning outside of a substitute for something else. It was untested. Heck, my guess is if she lost her stone she'd probably be fine getting a moissonite stone as a replacement now just because it's been settling in her head for years and years now.

In the end this is just me inferring how she feels. From my standpoint, I just wanted to do what she'd be satisfied with... which is another angle on the issue.

Just to add later: she did like the color and brilliance of moissonite. I remember her worrying about the hardness and not having an intuitive sense of how durable it was. I think if someone had been able to say "this has the same hardness as diamond" scientifically speaking she would have been ok? I have no idea. It was a strange gem to her and she was just as skeptical of it as she was about claims of any given diamond's provenance, ethics wise.