To me it's never been about 'what the artist intended' for all the reasons stated. Same goes with literary analysis and bogus arguments about 'authorial intention.' Also within the realm of the playback of audio media, we often hear talk of getting 'closer to the source,' which is the basis of the term 'high fidelity,' as in highly faithful to the source material, in this case digital but on my old two-channel system, analog. But this is fraught too, because every source has to played through some kind of playback chain in order to be heard and so is not, by definition, the source itself. We cannot hear the source itself. Never have been able to, never will be able to. So really, in the end, any analysis of a playback chain that claims to get you closer to the source or have higher fidelity is specious. A system can have higher resolution, better detail-retrieval, higher bitrate, more 'realistic' timbre or decay, to your ears, but that is just a tuning preference and you cannot claim any greater proximity to the platonic ideal of 'the source' than anyone else. You can prefer it to sound that way, and that's great if that's what you want to hear. But in the end, it really does come down to enjoyment. How much pleasure a playback system gives you dictates what you are willing to spend on it, I think. Spend according to your need for that pleasure, but not because you want to objectively argue your system is any way "better" than another. Ramen.