I'm just now coming back to this thread and must say that I'm quite impressed with the responses. It didn't occur to me that we could/should toss votes in favor of having a seperate headphone category, but it sure does make a lot of sense to do so. (Of course, it our 'vote stacking' efforts were overdone, this would become obvious.) In essence, we represent small subsector of the Audiogon population, and we're saying, "Hey, there really is something to this aspect of the audio hobby, and you folks don't know what you're missing."
My initial thinking wasn't that we should attempt to change how Audiogon members think, but rather to observe how they reacted to the thought of a headphone category (and to poke fun of their ignorance). Yet, to the extent that we can stimulate the level of interest in headphones at Audiogon, there may well be positive ripple effects at head-fi.
I'm now at the point where I won't even think about listening to any new recording more than once in my 2 channel system without then checking it out on headphones. Likewise, if I'm dropping in a new interconnect, power cord, source, amp, preamp, or whatever - and am in the process of assessing its sonic characteristics, some form of headphone listening is REQUIRED as an indispensible tool to me as an audiophile. In other words, I can't do without a headphone system any more than I can do without an SPL meter. It so happens that I often prefer headphone listening to 2 channel listening, but even if this were not true, I'd still need a pair of headphones as a monitoring device to do "reality checks" on the improvements brought on by upgrades and tweeks in my 2 channel system. Thus, based on my experience, it is my contention that all audiophiles could benefit by headphone ownership.