Millercarbon,
Very glad that you are happy with your Moabs. It would have been very discouraging to find after all of your research that your ultimate opinion didn't align with your expectations. Also, returning the speakers would have been a huge pain, and perhaps would have led to a confrontation with the designer -- I'm sure you're very glad to avoid all of that.
Your excellent outcome notwithstanding, it is still my view that the tool is more a parlor trick than anything else. If you read the Crutchfield patents on the tool, you will find that they use the purported transfer function of each speaker to do the compare. (How'd they generate that transfer function, BTW??) So no actual sound from the speakers is used to create the comparison; it is a filter applied to the samples. For that reason, among others, I think the tool is kind of silly. But if folks find it useful and find themselves happy with their Crutchfield speakers, that's great for them. To me, that doesn't prove the validity of the tool. If others are convinced otherwise, great for them and I respect their view, as well as yours.
I can't be sure, but your last sentence "At least, they are useful once you learn to listen" might have been intended as a slight toward me, implying that I am not sufficiently competent to make YouTube speaker reviews helpful. I would note that your argument cuts both ways. I can just as easily say that you aren't able to listen well enough to appreciate the difference between the YouTube videos and the actual performance in your room, and that your view is hopelessly tainted by, e.g., confirmation bias. But I see no reason to go there.
