Again, most engineers are fighting the same battle that you are Sean. The problem is two fold. For one, most bands attached to labels have little say in how their record sounds, except for the biggest, most established acts. Most people selling tons of records have absolutely no control over their album. At the same time, most people who are making independant recordings and who are not attached to a label only want something to compete with major label recordings. We DO try to educate our clients about good sound. We also get stuck between a rock and a hard place in that if we don't give the client what they want (loud, over compressed recordings), then we will often lose work.
As industry professionals our integrity is to do the job that we are hired to do. If it was purely up to me I would do many things differently with most of the recordings I produce. I also think that most music being produced (alot of the stuff that I work on in fact) is garbage as well, but much of the time it's not my place to comment on that either.
I also believe that the way recordings are produced today suits the way that most people listen to music. Less compression and more dynamic range is going to be bad news for most consumers. The real battle is over the role music place in the marketplace. The advent of the ipod, as well as the convenience of technology has turned music into a background affair. Most peolpe listen to music constantly for most of the day (be it on their ipod, the radio, on tv, in the car, etc), and as a result the meduim is losing its percieved value. We need to get more people actively listening, and going to live shows. Most people don't even listen to whole songs anymore.
The movement you're talking about will only occur if the general public changes their listening habits. Back when people would sit down and listen to an album in its entirety, many more people cared about sound quality than do today. Now the shift has been towards convenience and image, and things won't change until that changes. The vast majority of engineers would love to see a shift towards better recordings, but the market has to change first. Engineers complain about the state of the industry and sound quality more than audiophiles, if that's even possible. For now, we have to meet the demands of the market and our employers. Most of us are having a tough enough time working enough to feed our families. We live in a world where everyone thinks they are an engineer or producer, and budgets are always shrinking. It says alot that videos are more expensive than ever, when recording budgets are a fraction of what they were. The studio where I typically work charges less than similarly equipped studios 30 years ago, not accounting for inflation, and people still aren't exactly beating down the door.
The best thing for audiophiles to do is support the labels that do cater to us, and produce the kinds of recordings that you want to hear. There are lots of recordings produced today that sound better than ever, and we need to make sure that there's enough of a market to keep these people busy. We should also be fighting to get more people interested in music on an active level. If you can get somebody to start listening to music in an active way, and listening to complete albums, then getting them to care about sound quality is sure to follow shortly.
