We have more choices now than ever...
This may be part of the contributing problem to the debate. When there was only vinyl, the recording/engineering/pressing of the album was either good or bad, and it was usually pretty obvious. Now, we have many choices of sources to go along with our dizzying choices of amps, pre-amps, speakers, DACs, etc ad-nauseum. Add to that the fact that we listen to music everywhere (home, car, work, outside, in bed, etc) and in every way (two channel, multi-channel, iPods with ear buds, computer audio with headphones, boom boxes, car stereos, hotel lobbies, etc) it's near impossible to produce music in manner that suits all venues equally.
There are a lot of modern pop and rock albums that I really like that are hard to tolerate on my $20,000 hi-fi but sound great on the stock system in my car. Just the opposite is true for some of my favorite jazz albums - too much ambient noise in the car to really enjoy it.
Yes, the soul of music is the music itself; the performance. But being able to get to it - to connect to it? It's unfortunately become somewhat medium and venue dependent for a lot of music. Buying multiple versions of an album to find the one that you connect with gets expensive. I mean, how many of us own at least three versions of 'Kind of Blue?' Worth it for a handful of recordings, but near impossible for modern recordings.