We should reject hard-to-drive speakers more often

Let me try to use a better metaphor.

It's fine with me if you buy a car that gets 10 MPG.

What I disagree with is the awe and bragging rights associated with that. No, your car is not better to ride in or more exclusive than high MPG Cars just because it's low MPG.

Also, if you lie about your MPG you should be held accountable.

That's my complaint about hard to drive cars.  I personally have no stake in high vs. low efficiency.  It's the reviewers and machismo that says "Oh, look, my car needs to have 99 Octane fuel to run therefore it's a real sportscar!" that needs to die. 

If we are to reject hard to drive speakers then we must reject the SNR1 immediately as they are horribly hard to drive with all the terrible components in the passive crossover. Get that dreadful thing out of there and go active Nigel I implore you!

I still say it’s just different human perceptions of what sounds good

I had some 3-way tower speakers that were supposed to be the bees knees- scan speak drivers with Ber. tweets) at around 87db sensitivity (translation more like 84 db) 

Same thing, comments on how “smooth” or “even” they sounded…

Every time I tried to turn them up loud for a more live concert experience (rarely), they always seemed to fart out (probably the thermal compression mentioned)

Im talking loud as hell here (balls out) for just a song or two.

My floor to ceiling line arrays do seem to get there db wise, but still sound smoothed to hell in terms of dynamics

Only thing I really like about em is their uniform loudness wether listening close or far (they don’t blow your head off up close, or fade way off if far away…)

As always.…YMMV

In the opening, the OP said out loud that "We need to reject hard-to-drive speakers as being Hi-Fi". Now the tone was evolved to "... It's fine with me if you buy a car that gets 10 MPG. What I disagree with is the awe and bragging rights associated with that..." and followed by "No, your car is not better to ride in or more exclusive than high MPG Cars just because it's low MPG."

In reality, in the hi-fi world, I think very few audiophiles (if there is any) will procure speakers just because it's low efficiency. The speaker designed to have lower efficiency has its good reason. Take ATC speaker/driver as an example, if one desires a good low frequency extension out of a small-to-medium sealed enclosure (which I prefer) design speaker with a given size of driver, efficiency has to be sacrificed. Manufactures/designers could achieve higher efficiency by utilizing vented enclosure like tube/flat ports, lighter material for moving parts, horns, etc., but the sound reproduced from those designs may not suit some audiophiles' taste. In addition, quoted from the ATC designer, "The low mass parts are often not suited to the forces and resonances generated when reproducing audio at high SPLs and the structures that behave well at low levels can become unstable.  When the driver was reinforced for its stability and high internal damping, reduced sensitivity is unfortunately a trade-off.