They're regional, probably offer a nice discount to your builder, in business since 1905 according to their website. I doubt they'd be in business that long if they had a consistently inferior product. I'm not a painter but have painted plenty of rooms, furniture, homes etc in my life and in general my experience is if I buy the higher quality paint within a manufactures line I'm happy with the result.

If its custom specify whatever you like. It doesnt matter what the builder uses in other projects.

Yes, I know I can pick any paint brand, just curious to know if what he recommended was a quality paint since I was not familiar w the brand.

The grade of paint is more important than the brand. Cheap paint is cheap paint no matter who makes it.

As long as it's a top tier grade, I kind of don't care who makes it. When it comes to paint, "you get what you pay for" is pretty darn true.

Depends what it's for. So, latex is kind of latex these days. There are better and worse ones out there especially with color retention, but in general a higher end line latex from any reputable brand will perform well enough, especially in the hands of a painter who is accustomed to using that product. Don't skimp, go for the highest end product the brand offers. The cost difference of even $30-40 per gallon in your average residential home is still negligible vs the labor to paint an entire house.

Go check out the brand online. You should be able to hunt down the % of pigment solids in their top lines and compare to other brands. If the builder is used to using Farrell Calhoun, then that means their painters are used to using Farrell Calhoun and are probably pretty adept at spraying it.

The other thing you need to watch out for is that the brand has the appropriate product lineup for all of the different surfaces in the house. So for example if you are going for white trim....don't let them spray a basic latex enamel on your trim. You want something like a urethane enamel, pigmented poly, or an alkyd for trim. If you go to Farrell Calhoun's website you can see that they carry a wide variety of products made for different surfaces and applications from residential to commercial. They even carry old fashioned oil-based alkyd paint still but also have many specialized modern products like pre-cat lacquers and epoxy based surfacers. I'd be pretty comfortable with them just based on their product line I see.