Hello all, another engineer here. I love all the info here on the forum, but relying purely on measurements causes a powerful Déjà-vu to the time, when audio recording side of things shifted to from analog to digital.
In the name of better measurements (distortion, noise floor, linearity), the following things were driven out of studios: analog tape machines, tube and solid state preamps, analog mixing desks and so on. Digital gear was always "closer to the source, much cleaner, superior" to analog gear.
You make good points, I have just a minor point-of view divergence to try on you here. The interest of better measurements didn't drive analog gear out, cost, convenience, reliability and repeatability did. Much as CDs didn't replace LPs just because they measured (or even sounded) better, it got rid of concern over tracking for, wear of the stylus, hum susceptibility, quality of reproduction (the vinyl quality of the pressing), portability (we're were never going to play an LP in a car, boombox, on-person). And even though the audio is clearly better, we gave up a lot in the experience—I think one of the allures of the vinyl resurgence is that (compared to CD, but especially streaming audio) vinyl commands being treated with reverence. You don't have countless tunes you can pull up and change your mind on mid-song. You select one of a relatively few albums you have, carefully remove it from the sleeve, clean it, play a whole side, maybe while admiring the album cover.
I still have a working 8-track r-r here, a couple of 2-tracks. Pain in the ass, and tape is (and was) expensive. And the recorded music on it deteriorates. I have an old tune I need to get off a reel, I'll have to bake it and try to get a pass without gumming up the heads. All while the digital stereo mix is available and without change since the day it was mixed. ADAT took over in its day because 16-24 tracks recorders could be be afforded by few, while that number of tracks on ADAT could be in anyone's spare-room studio.
So everyone in happy with digital gear in recording world? Nope. Analog gear is making a comeback. Studios are trying to buy back similar gear they had in the past. Why? Because (for example) the harmonic distortion the those special pieces of gear provide sound pleasant for music listeners. So does analog tape compression and tape hiss (up to a point). Even a thing called analog summing was develop to fight the sterile digital sound.
Just point of view, but I don't consider digital inferior. Analog equipment is clearly inferior. But that's not to say it doesn't sound better. Notice we don't necessarily go for the designs of peak analog, we often go for much earlier designs. All analog gear is a compromise (forget tubes and transistors for a moment—transformers?). Over decades of development, an enormous number of designs eventually ended up in the dump. The compromises that had a sound more people liked endured and became the classics.
Fewer audible compromises are necessary with digital, most of it is in the bandlimiting filters. AND, the entire recording process is heavily compromised, we rarely even try to recreate live music and far as rock/pop (orchestral and choral another story), mics don't capture reality (go to a recording forum, check out mic comparisons, the highest form of praise is something like "wow, you sound just like a record"—not "wow, it sounds like you're right in my room"), we have multiple virtual rooms/plates in one recording, etc. Maybe a huge fault of digital is letting it through without the shellacking analog gear imparts. Even if not, the fact is we don't need to make the sort of compromises that result in particularly good, or poor, enjoyability. Pretty much the story of what we eat—we'd have pretty uninteresting food choices if refrigerators existed from day 1.
So having seen this happen, I was immune to falling for measurements when buying home HiFI gear? Of course not. I checked for the cleanest measurements (I could afford) and bough away. What I ended up with was with gear that were missing "soul". When listening to music, I'm looking for the feeling that you get when you stand next to a guitar/bass amp or next to the drum kit on stage.
The clean measuring gear left me with the same feeling like eating vanilla ice cream. Vanilla mixes well with other things, but it will benefit when combined with other tastes/colors. For example my old Benchmark DAC1 would measure horribly against modern day DACs, but still have not not been able to find a modern DAC that would draw me into the music like the DAC1 does.
In the past few months, my purchases have been a hand-made (in Russia) mic, new "old tech" (Neve-based) mic pre, 1776 and Pultec clones (and waiting on an LA-2A clone). I've never had much faith in plugin reproducing some of these nuances (and I am a plugin developer). A few do a pretty good job, but it's kind of crazy that we love the results of some of those old analog compromises so much, we try our best to recreate them digitally.
