I agree 100%, they should not be exclusive. I am just stating the obvious that intellengence and expertise in objective audio science sometimes do not intesect with integllegence and expertise in objective marketing and business. This forum proves this point every. single. day
Trust me ... that lead to considerable frustration when I first joined. I thought I would find an area where people were looking at products and examining them to death. Instead I found a bunch of people playing at science who were most often so detached from consumer reality that I actively questioned how their posts were allowed. Needless to say ... there was a lot of WTF going on at my place over this.
If you ask me even now, after a fair bit of backroom discussion, these forums are largely off course. Amir is reviewing consumer goods using a highly relevant testing scenario then everyone jumps in banging their favourite gongs. One conversation, in particular exemplifies this perfectly ... Someone mentioned the knuckle rap test for speakers... I suggested there was also value in simply pressing your hand against the cabinets as the speaker was playing to see how much it vibrated. The result was a major pissing contest with a guy bent on proving that vibrations don't matter, that got me put in the penalty box for a week... Yet, it has long been my experience that if you feel vibrations on the larger panels of a speaker it is likely to colour the sound when you get them home.
I still have questions about the goal of all this... but, FWIW, I'm here to help people decide which products make sense and which to avoid.