I feel that if you just slowed down and didn't jump to the conclusion that I was suggesting vinyl was better than CD, per se, then we wouldn't have to have this back and forth. In the last paragraph of my first post I said: "Digital as a medium is greatly superior to analogue". I then went on to qualify with a few opinions as to why vinyl may, sometimes, seem to sound better and you mistook me for saying it was unequivocally better.
You even agree with me, to an extent, in your last paragraph, saying: "There is the possibility of high-frequency loss, the tape can shed over time and so on. There's a few tapes that have been compromised to the extent that the LP version has some advantages over the CD reissue."
Ok, so some vinyl sounds better than some CDs, if I had said precisely that from the beginning, could we have avoided this? You are arguing with me over, by and large, my agreeing with you.
As to why bias confirmation, distortion and so on determine people's choices, I'd say it is because trying to reproduce a double bass over, often times at best, stereo 8" bass drivers or more commonly 5" bass drivers, is impossible to any real degree of accuracy - so perhaps it is just a case of pick your own poison as to which distortions the individual finds least offensive. Perhaps the distortion on vinyl is more pleasant than driving a small speaker (say something smaller than a JBL M2) into distortion with volume and it gives the effect of high volume, without the unpleasant distortion (or potential hearing loss) of true volume. So many things are at play and so many distortions (of greater or lesser effect) are made, from the microphone recording through to the speakers reproducing, that to an extent some of this is a matter of taste, no?
Do you like Fritz Kreisler? I like him a lot, there have never been any close to his sound to my mind, yet almost all his recordings are on 78 shellac recordings. Noisy as hell, and makes LP distortion look like nothing and yet there he is, playing in the way only he can and he cuts through the noise all the same. I can listen to countless more recent violinists on far superior recordings, but few are as evocative as Fritz was, so much so that I am willing to suffer listening to him under all that noise (that I'd much rather wasn't there, truth be told) and in low fidelity, compared to listening to a more recent violinist play the same pieces.
Why would I do this? I suppose it demonstrates that there are certain distortions that are more or less acceptable to each individual and that'll we'll have to decide, to an extent, what this is for ourselves. I hope you now understand the point I was trying to make at first and we don't have to continue talking past each other.