Oooohhh .... The OP tickles an old fetish of mine summat cruel. Methinks the rot set in around 1070, just as I was becoming interested in HiFi, when the old loudspeaker designers who knew what they were doing started leaving the trade. Manufacturers had realised that amplifiers, and signal sources (receivers, turntables etc), were getting cheaper to make, but that the manufacturing costs of high-quality loudspeakers were only going to increase, as it was still a manual job. After that, design and manufacturing of mid-cost speakers became a branch of furniture making.

Once you let the money men into the board room, everything (as noted in the OP) becomes a numbers game, and a matter of what the customer can be persuaded to not notice is missing. Our TV doesn't even reproduce bass notes properly, much to my distress when listening to Fairport or Jethro Tull, and our stereo doesn't do CDs.

I'll leave it there, as I really can witter on about this by the quarter-hour.