Your advice to speakers designers

If aesthetics are important then the sound will never be great.  I have no problem with people who want to listen to good looking speakers in a good looking room but if that's what you want you don't need to care too much about electronics.  You don't need to care about cables at all.  Get some good speakers that don't do anything too wrong, sit back and enjoy. 

You can pretty a good sounding room up a bit but room treatments are inherently homely.  It's all subjective anyway but anything dealing with sound absorption/diffusion is going to have to have quite a bit of surface area to be effective and will have to be placed where it works effectively.  Neither of these things are conducive to good looks.  If looks, decor are a priority the sound will suffer.  I don't believe there's any way around it.  

This is going nowhere since great looks and great sound are subjective.  If I ever get a dedicated room again I'll get it to sound how I want it to and then over time I'll try to make it look halfway decent.  I tend to like a room that is pretty well damped so I need quite a bit of absorption. 

I've done it all before.  I built a ton of bass traps and combined with some digital eq I had the bass response +-1 decibel in my concrete basement.  It had been +-15 at least.  I wouldn't go through that again.  Getting the bass to have a perfect frequency response caused more problems than it solved in my opinion.  I had to make big cuts at the worst resonance frequencies and this killed transients and just didn't sound right IMO.  

The ideal amount of absorption is subjective and depends on what you're listening to.  If studio recordings that are very damped you'd want less absorption than if you're listening to live recordings where you want to hear the live atmosphere as it was rather than the sound of your room over top of it.  Unless that's not what you want, it's about personal preference to a great degree.

Over time I've come to better understand what drives this hobby.  Stereophile is a better word than audiophile.  It's mostly about the stereo for most people.  It's similar with watch lovers.  It doesn't much matter how well the watch tells time, although it does need to tell time.  Exclusivity, talking points, luxurious looks?  I'm not sure what it's all about. 

I've always wanted the best performance for the money.  Since I'm like 99.9% of people and don't have infinite funds I have to limit what I'm gonna spend.  If I'm gonna spend 10k on a pair of speakers I'd take the ones that have the best performance because they're painted flat black and all the money was spent on the things that influence performance.  I understand that manufacturers have to spend on looks to stay in business.  I don't criticize them for it.