Your question was clear, but I thought my response was too. That is, as you quoted me, there are always two sides, subjective vs objective. On the subjective side, it means little because who are you going to believe, and that's why I also suggested perhaps doing a poll. With a poll, then you can least take (good luck trying though) a good sample size of say 20 and see how many will say yes vs no.
Edit: Your question referred to "are Anthem owners satisfied.....without making modifications?", my
own specific answer is, "No", but only because of the lack of deep bass, and I am just one such "Anthem owners". Just browsing through many forum posts, I know there are many who made modifications but I don't know if we can conclude that the answer to your question is a Yes/No type.
As an example, using your criteria, that is "with ARC Genesis out of the box, just following the instructions, and without making modifications", I was satisfied (with a "but" to follow..) with ARC Genesis in terms of the overall "sound quality"
but it was also unremarkable, except the deep bass seemed mostly disappeared. Then I spent hours and hours, over several days (taking rest in between to read up on forums, Anthem's instructions, Youtube videos etc., to learn as much as I could on ARCG), and the results were the same, that is, without making manual tweaks, the deep bass, that is below 50 Hz were noticeably weaker. That's my own subjective experience, so I don't know how/if that can help you. On the more objective side, I took many measurements, and they clearly confirmed what I heard was real. In a doubt blind test though, I may still fail, unlikely but possible.
Just a quick search of the topic, I found something I could quote, such as the follow post on the ARCG user thread on AVSF, from a poster who seems to have similar experience, but only to some extent as he did not say anything about the bass.
One immediate response from a helpful member there said to him:
In my case though, I did all of those things Bob and Yonnette mentioned, over and over, so I know the results I got was not because of me not following instructions.
There are many posts about bass issues but those threads have hundreds of post so it is hard to sort them out. Suffice to say opinions are all over the map, so if you look at those subjective views, I don't know how that would help.
For objective measurements, you won't find too many of those on those hundred pages Anthem threads. Most, if not all, including that helpful gentleman, seem to rely only on the graphs generated by ARCG. We all know those are projected FR that are often very different from FR measured, and I have no idea how that community could rely on using such projected graphs to help tweaked each others. I spent many hours tweaking, and then measured with REW to see the effects after each change made, in order to achieved the level of smoothest I could accept, as show in my posted graphs on this thread. Those who rely on the ARCG generated graphs are probably relying on Placebo effects, in my opinion, or imagination.
Descartes might have misunderstood my point, that is, I only measured the FL/FR and two subs, not that I use my Anthem for that purpose. I wanted to compare ARCG with Dirac DLBC so the only way I can AB compare them quickly, and both subjectively and objectively, is to use the FL+FR+Sub1+Sub2. Actually, if the RC software works good with two channel and two subs, it will work good with multichannel too.
