Very fun to read and to feel the empathy! You put into more words the adage that many audiophiles use music to listen to their system. And you also nailed how Audiogon (and USAM) completely enable many of us, as you wrote, go from recreationally using to full-blown addiction, helped by Paypal Credit and Affirm financing.
Your first example of commenting on the sonic clarity is akin to someone watching a video clip of a particularly poignant event of movie commenting on the video quality.
Or like when someone posts a link to a piece they wrote that details an experience many of us here on this forum have had, only to have many members smugly snark about a social media site.