My guess is that for many rooms, having more expensive speakers (often correlated with bigger boxes and deeper bass extension) is not yielding the same increase in performance as an increase in the quality of the electronics.
In Japan or Western Europe, people have smaller living spaces and it is very rare to have dedicated hifi rooms for people living in big cities. It must be the same in New York, SF or Seattle. It might make sense to have transparent, high achieving speakers like Spendors, ProAc and others at 6-8k and have excellent upstream components rather than the big Wilsons in the living room. And the missus probably wouldn't like to have big boxes in the middle of a 300 sqf living room ;-)