question about speaker placement. dead end room?

sorry for what may seem like a stupid question but here it is anyway. my "hi-fi mentor" came over yesterday to give a listen to my new system upgrades and tweeks. recently upgraded my power lines and cords along with IC's and speaker cable (still waiting for one final IC and power cord but i'm 90% there).

he stated that regardless of what i upgrade and how good i think it sounds, my speaker placement is too close to the rear wall. he said i shouldn't bother upgrading anymore until this can be resolved (waste of money until i get the speaker position right in his opinion) my aerial 7b's are about 14 inches off the wall measuring from the rear port and 28 inches if measuring from the front woofer. the room is such that even testing the aerial's at a "good distance" off given wall is impossible. my listening position would be way too close.

i use a velodyne dd12 which comes with a very useful/in depth tuning kit. spent many hours with this kit and finally got a pretty flat curve in the end (which also happened to sound right/good to my ears). it did take alot of work to get rid of a few huge base peaks, but i did get them hammered out eventually.

there is no way to put the aerial's in a postion that meets the general guidelines of speaker placement...per the cardas web site and other resources. would need to relocate the entire system to a different room and install a new dedicated ac line. neither of which is something i want to do.

my question is....

do i really have a "dead end room" where i've basically gone as far as i can go?. am i wasting my money on these IC and power source upgrades when such a glaring "sin" is present in my system.

like i said before....i think my system sounds pretty good. just wondering if i'm spinning my wheels (and tossing money away) by pushing forward with small, incremental upgrades and tweeks.