The current headphones area seems to be completely irrational to me at the moment on so many levels. The craziest thing being that we're getting a slew of wireless, DSP enabled ANC headphones with rubbish, irrational FR curves (irrational as in they are way off the channel of "acceptable" dB values per frequency we know of either in terms of personal preferences or anatomical variations, ex something like this is unlikely to correspond to even a very small minority of human beings' personal preferences or HRTF variations and would probably frequently loose in blind tests to a lot of alternatives
https://www.rtings.com/headphones/graph#813/4011) and that right now, at leat as far as FR curves on test rigs are concerned, the best measuring headphones we're getting are nearly all wired, passive and in the $100-$300 range, including closed ones !
I have a feeling that it is in large part because the headphones industry still hasn't experienced the consolidation it deserves (way too many small, boutique / garage companies "audiophiles" invariably find charming) and that rational product development remains difficult for a lot of them (even after more than a decade of consumer preference research I wouldn't be surprised to learn that a lot of acoustics engineers are still confronted with product managers asking them "hey we want to make a pair of super trendy headphones for young fashionable people so we need a lot of super bass !").
The only area that seems to me to be making strides forward is the sealing earbuds one where FR curves are getting less and less irrational.
It's really annoying as we're starting to get all the necessary individual pieces to make a decent leap forward in terms of fidelity, at least as a lab experiment. We can already start thanks to numerous databases of ear shape vs. measured HRTFs to confront a user's specific anatomy to these databases and come up with an algorithm that creates a decently working personalised HRTF for that user (for example with an algorithm using neural networks but other techniques have been published). If the ear cups are large enough to use optical sensors we can already use structured light to make a rough 3D map of the user's pinna to gather the user's anatomical data (think Apple's Face ID but for someone's ear) - and Apple is already considering other types of sensors to at least gather a rough image of the user's ear such as long-range capacitance sensors. ANC headphones already have internal mics to ensure that the bass / lower mids response corresponds to a desired target, and AKG's N90Q uses them to
try to figure out a better, individualised response higher up. Internal DSPs can EQ the headphones to vary the target according to personal preferences. None of that is ever going to happen with passive headphones.
But nooooooo, what we apparently need is a pair of these with their magically shaped gorilla glass :
https://www.rtings.com/headphones/graph#669/4012