How competitive are you with your system?

I don’t care what others think of mine. There’s  likes are no business of mine. 

I'm kind of anti-competitive. 

I see speakers or gear on Stereophile and think "Wow, I've got a better sounding system than that and I only paid 10% of the cost!" 

My take is that I think it’s almost impossible not to wonder how your system compares to others’.  I believe it’s human nature. 

Generally speaking, as a principle I avoid comparing to others like the plague.  
When one compares, the creative mind can always find examples of others better than you AND examples of others worst than you.  The former can lead to feelings of envy/resentment, while the later can lead to feelings/attitude of superiority/pridefulness - both to be avoided.

In high-end audio, we strive to build our systems to be subjectively sonically pleasing, realizing that it’s not the same as a live event (reality), but can get very close at times depending on equipment and subject preferences.

@rvpiano - normally, after significant investment in time, resources, and effort, we are supposed to have increasing satisfaction with our systems as we raise subjective sonics in our system building.  I highly suspect it’s not a “comparison” issue with you, but rather a dissatisfaction/disappointment with the Sonics of your current system - if you loved your Sonics, you wouldn’t be looking elsewhere.  If you are disappointed that it doesn’t sound like reality/live music, then you have an unrealistic comparison as audio chains are at best a facsimile of reality, and the quality of recordings are all over the map.  

I don't know how or why my system got so darned competitive; I'd like to think that it was just an innate flaw in its nature and nothing that I did, but I am sure that it is probably due to mistakes I made when it was in its formative years.

If you think about it, if one were to use AI, they could do a digital rendition of a direct transfer and the recording and have the program "overlay" them looking at any differences in the bits.  The fewer the differences, the higher the score?