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I have to whole-heartedly disagree with you.
Do many of these features already exist in current products? Of course, I don't think anyone would argue that. But what I think you miss with the sound-only stance is that for the majority of consumers, the balance of those features is also very important. I've been trying to decide between 3 different devices as an upgrade for the past couple months, at least, and still can't come to a conclusion because, while all those devices are excellent, each has balance issues that prevent me from picking a clear winner. If there was a perfect player out there for me, I'd have it almost regardless of the cost. But that isn't the case for me or most others. What people in this thread (myself included) have done is list the features which really matter to them. A lot of people have very similar ideas, and many of the requested features I don't think are too unreasonable. I think a lot of it really can be done to make a great balanced DAP.
If you want to throw out battery life and storage considerations, etc., for an uncompromising focus on sound quality, then guess what? There's already a product for you. It's called the S:flo2 and by all accounts should give you a fantastic 6 or 7 hours of listening to a small portion of your music collection. Personally, a poor UI, short runtime, and limited storage capacity make it pretty easy for me to pass up, sound quality be damned. And that's true of a lot people.
FiiO's philosophy seems to be one of providing products to a large target market at a low price, so I don't think they're aiming to design an extreme niche audiophile product here. They have to find what lots of people care about in a portable music player in order to design something that lots of people would want. Nobody wants a dud of a player, but lots of people, even here, want more than sound quality alone.
Edit:
Personally, I'm less than satisfied with anything less than 10 hours for battery life. More is obviously nicer for those longer periods you have to go without a charger, but for the most part I would agree with you that more than 24 hours is unnecessary for all but the most extreme cases.
However, if FiiO went the route you suggested, I'd honestly be a disappointed at what could have been. The thing may sound better, but it will come at a pretty big cost to usability for a lot of potential users.
What I would like to see is a player that sounds good and strikes a better balance between features than the competition. What I won't bother with is a player that sounds great while sacrificing all else.