Fact of the matter is, that many of the "crappy" speakers of the '70s etc., were pinpoint engineered to do the best that could be done with the substandard pop/rock recordings of the times. The Japanese had it figured right down to the penny and managed to find a market of previously unwitting audiophiles in the process.
Sure, these designs are 'technically' inferior, but those with superior speakers had no friends over on party night. Why? Because the superior speakers were way too revealing for popular music, and their users were moved on to superior music that nobody else really listened to. Even today, when we see speaker reviews above most common people's pay grades, the subjective performance will typically be based on some wildly eccentric music that really tells nothing to anyone outside of that relatively odd realm.
Fast forward some decades and we now have a glut of well engineered/measured speakers and people will in turn, install them into the most sterile, acoustically unfriendly rooms, that leave these designs having to be crutched by a fortune in room treatments and room corrective software, that tries to artificially put the furniture and cozy, random clutter back in. As before, these special environments go mostly unused and the crowd ends up where they can put their feet up without being corralled into some centrally located, grouped together sweet spot like drones.
Me, I like both types for what they do well, but it leaves me wanting multiple designs for different purposes, some of which are of questionable quality.
