I agree with most of what you say; except that the people mixing and mastering are idiots. While it is true that most everything released today is compressed into the last couple dBs, I suspect it is the client that is saying: ``When I play the CD you mixed up for me today in the car, I couldn't hear the quite passages . . . make it sound more like what is on the radio.'' Moreover, every sound engineer is told to listen to his mix on every source he can find and optimize it so it sounds good on everything -- the problem, is that what sounds great on a boom-box doesn't sound great on a multi-thousand dollar audiophile system and vise-versa.
So, like everything, change doesn't start with the sound engineer, it starts by chaging the want of the average Joe. While we are a large enough niche to have companies like Chesky make CDs with wider dynamic ranges for us, we will never be large enough for major labels to produce "audiophile" versions of all their CDs (besides, then everyone would want it and complain it doesn't sound good on the $99 boom-box they got at Walmart).