This is not about smarts. It is about having broad knowledge of the industry and not suffering from angst over MQA, Meridian, Bob Stuart, etc. which is coloring your views. Your doctor doesn't need to be smart. He just needs to know more about medicine than you.
There is a reason none of your dire predictions have come true. MQA has not taken over the world. DRM has not returned to music. In the clear content has not been shut down. None of these conspiracy theories spread by "smart people" have materialized. Everything is working as it normally does in format making, audio industry.
The reason is that people stand up and shout, they make their displeasure heard and they spread the word far and wide about the scammy nature of MQA, as well as other proprietary formats and DRM schemes. If we just laid down and let the industry bigwigs do whatever they liked, music would be locked down and only temporarily licensed to you. They only see music as a revenue stream, not as culture and art. We music lovers have to stand up to them every time they come up with a new scheme to lock down music.
It's a bit like the Y2K problem. Years after, people are saying "well it wasn't such a big thing, really. Nothing really happened". But they completely ignore that thousands and thousands of people worked hard to educate about the problem and make sure everyone had a way to solve or at least work around the problem, to minimize the effects. In a sense, they did their job too well, because very few people even noticed.
I will never stop speaking out against proprietary standards and DRM. I will never stop promoting open formats and standards, because no one has the right to lock down culture, no matter what some hopped up marketing slug in a suit thinks.
We won't win every battle, but we will never stop fighting.
So choose to listen to yourselves when you have never known the inside story of how this world turns. Or listen to me. This is the logic that is facing you, rather than how many people are on which side of an argument. How did that become the decided factor in anything?
Now excuse me as I continue testing the ifi Zen MQA DAC.
I'm not sure who made you The Grand Oracle Of All Truth, but whoever did so needs to reign in their ego.
You don't know every one of us, you don't know what we've done, where we've worked and which experiences we've drawn. Stop acting as if you do.
Popular support means everything. If you don't have the people on your side, you will be overthrown.