Your comments apply to every opinion and advice given on ASR (and any other forum). Especially since data is not opinion. Even your comments here are just an opinion. So do they apply? Especially since you've chosen to go down that path. Further we can all be wrong and data can be misinterpreted. Be careful that horse you're on might buck and thumbs up won't make for any softer landing.
I wouldn't call his comments an opinion. If you mostly base your recommendations on your own personal bias cocktail, then their value
will be a complete coin toss in the hands of others. If people trust your advice, the impacts might be skewed towards a positive scenario, solely because you "pass the expectation bias on" so to speak, but it's still a highly unpredictable and volatile exercise.
If a person complains about the bass being bloaty in their setup, one advice might be to do some REW measurements. If it shows a nasty standing wave at the listening position, there's lots of additional advice to be given, that has a good chance of either remedying or lessening the situation.
Another "advice" could be to replace you interconnects with something much more fancy and expensive. And yes, the expectation bias you get from spending all that money and installing those lovely looking cables in your system
might be strong enough to make you ignore the actual standing wave. But only for a while. A standing wave doesn't just go away and expectation bias doesn't last forever. Then you can try to follow other types of similar "advice", but in the end you'll just be stuck in a loop of gratification and let-down. The problem will never really be solved.
And yeah, more often than not this type of "advice" seems to be given in an attempt at fixing a completely imaginary issue. I guess you could argue that since both the problem and the solution is imaginary, but a positive outcome is perceived, then no real harm is done. Indeed the gratification from purchase/ownership and the subsequent tinkering and emotional attachment is what appears to be the main driving force behind this hobby. Effective solutions and reality checks are more of a footnote.
And I get it. There's not much pride of ownership to be had if your audio gear doesn't do something magical. A simple tool designed to reproduce audio is no fun
