Texasdave...
I always thought that Sony had a more or less equal part in CD development, but you may be right about that. I vividly remember driving over to Albany NY having already decided to buy my first CD player, a Sony, and then being astonished at how much better a Mission player sounded. That player was based on the oversampling 14 bit Phillips player, and I used it for almost two decades until it finally quit working. The sound was good right up to the day it died.
The "vinyl crowd" are not bothered by what others see as faults of LP technology, and react with criticism of the alternative, CDs and digital recording in general. (A bit like politics today). Digital recording came before CDs. Many LPs were digitally recorded. Even the early professional digital recording equipment was capable of performance better than the LP and CD media avaliable to the consumer. Also remember that analog microphones are involved when a digital recording is made, and the variation of sound between different microphones is huge compared with any slight difference between analog and digital recorders. Variation of sonic quality is, as you suggest, entirely a matter of the skill of the recording and mixing engineers. This is still true with today's SACD and DVDA.
Sometimes the early versions of recording technology are better than what follows. The very first stereo LP issued was an Audio Fidelity recording of the Dukes of Dixieland. I don't have that LP, but I have a subsequent Dukes recording that came out about a month later. It is well worn, but it has perhaps be best stereo effect of any LP that I own. Also, early Vanguard stereo recordings were made using only two microphones, and they also sound great. After a while the recording companies found that it was necessary to blend LF into mono (horizontal groove modulation) and do compression and peak limiting so that their records could be played on ordinary (non audiophile) equipment. Multitrack recording became the norm, and mixing down to two channels sometimes led to aweful results. Sonic quality deteriorated.