The car analogies really fall down because they're not really paying attention to the fact that cars have been designed for different goals.
Maybe the car doesn't go faster, but it gets better mileage, is better for the environment, and is almost exponentially safer in the case of an accident.
OTOH, one place where the car analogy holds is that there are at least two different types of design, and people not infrequenly confuse them. That's not all that surprising, either, because the different types of designs impinge on each other.
The "lines" of a car are part aesthetic choice, part a concession to aerodynamics, and then whatever limits of materials, costs, weight, etc. that emerge from that. Liking or not liking the resulting "lines" is a subjective appreciation thing, but those
exact same lines can be discussed from completely objective aerodynamic principles and constraints.
I sometimes see complaints about systems, objectivity, and so forth that seem to make no such distinctions about competing limits. For example, in a much older argument, you'd sometimes see people complain bitterly about D&D using a d20 to govern the attack calculation, usually favoring replacement with some kind of bell curve die set, such as 3d6, on the grounds that "crit on a 20" happened "too frequently" or other complaints about a linear result set divided into 5% increments. Such people are usually impervious to any discussion of the design trade-offs that such switches necessarily entail, and what that means for the rest of the system. (I'm particularly aware of this one, because I happen to share their sensibilities on the feel of the d20 to a large degree, while still managing to appreciate some of the design decisions that make the d20 not so easily dismissed.)
So does it appear to me a lot of the unconcious design advocated for the wizard and other such issues. It is almost as if some get so caught up in the aesthetics of the "lines" that no other, more objective design issues are allowed to have much real purchase. They'll receive a few nods, the same way that people will allow that, "of course, handling time and other playability issues need to be addressed," but then will systematically ignore such issues beyond a bit of lip service.
It is as if someone had gone to an engineer and demanded marble counter tops on the hood of an economy car, and then expected the rest of the vehicle to somehow make up for this choice. The engineer might attack it as an interesting challenge, but he'll never consider the project itself to be representative of good design.
And all of that, doesn't even touch the fact that some of us appreciate good design as itself part of an aesthetic reaction. We are the "form follows function" crowd, and forever divided from those that see it the other way around. Yep, Shakespeare's sonnets really are objectively superior to that hack Emily Dickenson in one sense, whatever you may subjectively appreciate or not in other senses. The sonnets use a form more likely to produce a pleasing result when rendered in English. Iambic pentameter really is a better choice for poetry than iambic tetrameter. I understand it's the reason why medieval French poetry is so difficult to translate into English, the pleasng sound in medieval French being the opposite (though not reading medieval French, I'm going on authority here).
