I think bass is one of the last things audiophiles understand
That's for sure. Virtually all of them are still stuck in the understanding exemplified in this thread. OP went from one sub to another, swapping when he should have been adding.
Low bass is near impossible to do, for the simple reason you cannot fit 50 foot long bass waves into a 20 foot long room. The wave reflects and comes back and cancels itself before it even gets going. For many years I tried everything and never heard anything work properly and had given up. The physics are just too daunting.
Until a couple years ago on this site Tim (noble100) and some others were talking about a Swarm or Distributed Bass Array. Do a search for these if you want to understand low bass. Read everything you can find by Tim and Duke. Read the research paper and doctoral thesis that started it all.
While you are at it check out the dates of the papers and discussions. Then reflect on how slow people are to change and learn and adopt new ways of doing things, even when clearly superior. Everyone who has been on this site more than 2 years knows all this. Half a dozen of them should have chimed in by now saying don't swap, add. Instead, crickets.
I think bass is one of the last things audiophiles understand
Duke, Tim, DBA. Now you know how to not be one of those audiophiles.