Right and if you've bought and handled and looked at enough drivers you can tell what price class they belong to just by looking at them. In this case, it looks like a SEAS curv cone which uses a woven polypropelene if I am not mistaken. Cast frame, free air resonance below 40hz, weighs 3 1/2 pounds, 20mm xmax, advanced spider design. 90 dollars at retail.
Meanwhile the driver used in the Pioneer Bs22 is a cast frame, and only 4" in diameter, so less than half the radiating area, with less xmax, and we're supposed to believe they're in the same universe? I'm not even talking about just bass, a 6" woofer will have a lot more headroom at midrange frequencies as well.
I would love it if a budget speaker came along which blows away everything, but unlike in DACs where the parts are generally cheap and small, good speakers require large amounts of powerful magnets, heavy and large cabinets, and for passive speakers, a good amount of copper and large capacitors. That stuff costs money.
It is pretty cool that we're getting data points from all price brackets but I think we've seen what really cheap speakers can do at this point.
I think this is a key thing about the preference score that needs to be understood and written in big bold letters: It's only useful within a speaker's comfortable range. So maybe the pioneer would come close or win in a small room at lowish volumes with certain program material that doesn't stress dynamic range much, but it is intuitively unlikely it would do so at high SPLs or perhaps even 'normal ones' for the reasons you stated.
Unfortunately, we don't really have a great way of consistently determining that comfort range right now, so we have to use our intuition to at least some degree.
Not to say there aren't measurements for determining that, but a system isn't currently in place and it could significantly increase the effort involved. Here thorough listening tests could be useful, as there are occasional surprises (I never found myself stressing the Devialet phantom reactor in my everyday listening despite its size, for example) but understandably Amir can't do those yet.