Overall, I found this an interesting post, so thanks for that, seriously. I'd love to talk about emotions being evoked is definitely something to enjoy, but isn't necessarily about quality (since that's individual brain chemistry and so forth); how people don't necessarily want to glom their preferences (seems a bit general to me); how what might be arguable is the values of certain qualities over others (and not necessarily what is a quality for a certain thing) etc. It's an interesting topic, to be sure.
...
are just so unnecessarily snarky so as to make the back-and-forth not enjoyable. I don't know; maybe it's "your thing" and I am just not appreciating it, but between that and putting words in my mouth (all the "or are you sayings") my enthusiasm has just dropped a lot. I am genuinely not trying to be insulting.
I apologize (sincerely) if that was snarky. That was not my intent. This is my third post on this topic in this thread, and I have discussed this repeatedly on prior threads.
It's a subject that I do find frustrating, simply because the objective/subjective difference* is fairly stark when it comes to most things that are being discussed. In other words, if something is being discussed and argued about, it almost, by definition, cannot be something that can be objectively determined through use of an agreed-upon outside referent.
(The only reason I say almost is because, well, there are people that will argue about anything. As I have pointed out before, there is an entire thread that consists of a person arguing that working out every other day means you can work out 4 days every week. That is something that can be objectively determined, and yet ....)
The difficulty I have is that there are people, in good faith, who will argue over and over again that art, music, games, and so on ... the
quality of those things can be objectively determined. But ... that's a construct that we make. We can discuss how things affect us. We can discuss things like the technical mastery required to make something. We can (and do!) have productive conversations about what we think is better designed, or what music we like better ....
Or, if you're me, you'll periodically post list of the best TV shows.
But the quality isn't something that is objective. It's something that we can have our opinions on, and it's important to be able to identify why we have those opinions (and some opinions can be better-sourced than others), but in the end the quality of something, whether something is better or worse, will be subjective.
And it's frustrating because if something was objective, then there wouldn't even be a discussion. And what fun would that be?
*There are other uses of objective and subjective, like "try to be objective when you're mediating a case," or "the goal of a good journalist is to objectively report the story," but that's different uses.