There's your problem. You you were feeling profoundly, slobberingly retarded; you threw yourself into a nest of random slobbering retards, and you got some on you. No surprise there.
Fixed gearing is a drivetrain, not a bike. If you want a good fixed gear bike, cheap, then get a good cheap used bike with horizontal dropouts and add a fixed gear rear wheel. That approach can land you an actually OK fix for the price of a sucker-born-every-minute crapheap from a nameless eBay seller. Or go ahead and continue hunting online for "affordable fixies" and continue to get retard slobber on you.
All the bikesdirect.com fixies I have worked on (Mercier, Windsor, Vilano, etc.) have sucked. All the no-name eBay fixies I have worked on, and the State bikes, Republic bikes, what have you, have sucked even more-- which is remarkable. And though they require more care and diligence than real bicycles, they inevitably get less. I can't tell you how many times I've had a cheap me-too fix in my shop that was missing two or more chainring bolts out of five. Heck, most of them never even get lubricant or air until they stop going.
It was at least five years ago when I noticed that fixies had already jumped the shark so badly that there were high schoolers and balding fortysomething dudes coming in asking for them, usually not knowing what fixed gearing meant. In my neck of the woods, most of the chump market for fixed gears has moved on to something else (be it more functional bicycles, hardtail chopper motorcycles, or beards so long that they preclude riding anything with an open chain drive), leaving committed hipsters and bike polo players in charge of the category.
EDIT:
P.S. - High tensile steel frames are typically not made to a weaker spec than chromoly steel frames. The manufacturer-- even a rinky-dink online seller-- doesn't want to get sued by people who got hurt when their bike folded up underneath them. They just use more steel if the steel is weaker. I do the same thing when I'm building frames from scratch. The weaker the material I'm using, the more of it I use.
So that means a hi-ten frame will be heavier and usually stiffer than a chromoly frame. Unless it's built with genuine incompetence and/or callous indifference (e.g. Walmart bikes), it will probably be less likely to fail than a lighter frame made of better material.