Rove wrote: " I beleive many owners may be using one component of a system (cables for example) to compensate for flaws in other components in the system."The implies that there is a single standard to which any particular component should be designed.
That's simply not the way engineering works, whether one is building airplanes or stereo equipment. Every choice one makes when designing a product has advantages and disadvantages and the accumulation of those choices represent an overall compromise the designer is willing to live with.
For example, in an airplane you can add bigger fuel tanks that allows the plane to fly farther. However, this increases weight and has implications that ripple through the rest of the plane's design.
Same thing with the design of audio products. One amp's designer may choose circuit topology that offers superb performance in one area but leaves the unit more sensitive to cable parameters.
Your comment would suggest this design is simply wrong, regardless of the other benefits the designer believes it offers.
However, it is not uncommon for a designer to choose performance with restrictive requirements over options that offer more benign compatibility.
That is why it is important to treat the amp, cable and speaker as a lumped circuit. In order for music to come out of the speakers, they must all interact. Take a speaker wire out of one circuit where it works fine and it may not work as well in another.
I don't think there is anything particularly magic or mysterious going on, other than the fact that most home users have to discover the best combo by trial and error. That easily leads to the incorrect assumption that what ever works for them should be the same for everyone else.
Finally, just for the record, I'm not in the camp that finds "massive" differences between wires (unless there is just something horridly wrong, such as unshielded telephone wire being used for a turntable interconnect.) Pay a bit of attention to resistance, look at capacitance and inductance parameters, consider shielding issues, have good connections and I'm fine to leave the obsessive/compulsive mental gyrations to others. ;-)