How good is good enough?

I can't say I'm never upgrading anything more, but I've reached a point where spending more money on upgrades is not really going to improve my listening experience. Most people including your friends and family will never care if you spend their inheritance on a really expensive system because you want to sit there and replay the plucks of a string instrument to impress them with the realism of your system. They will not care, most people will not care about slight differences in your system or music. I'd almost say nobody cares, but nobody in my orbit cares about my system or would even want to sit and listen. It's about me, and I sure will not have my life enriched in any way because of some slight difference in sound and we sure don't sit around talking about the spend. Most people on the planet want to enjoy the music as background and do not want to sit and hear you ramble on about swapping tubes, amplifier architecture, etc. Once you realize nobody cares about what you bought, you'll be in a better place. Once you get past the obsession of buying things, you'll feel better. A huge expensive system may be amazing, but it will add nothing to your life, maybe the opposite.

Sometimes it’s the chase that’s the most exciting 

We all know you can get a surprisingly musical sounding system for a few thousand dollars, a really nice set up for $10K, $20K, 30K etc & if chosen correctly, amazing sounding systems for whatever you want to spend w/ not much limit. 
 

Doesn’t it essentially depend on both how much music reproduction means to us in conjunction w/ the number of 0’s in our bank account?

We all drop a couple $’s without thinking about it, maybe $5 or $10 the same but perhaps not so much w/ $50, $100 or $200 but that’s just pocket change for a person w/ many millions  in the bank. 

Very good post!

My answer will be because we refuse or do not understand why we must learn minimal basic acoustics concepts and how experimenting with them ...

Thank you!

The only problem I see with your argument is that there are people who are never done with their acoustic treatments, too.

Put another way -- I think you’re right that too many people ignore acoustics and focus on gear. But there are people who cannot stop treating their room and that amounts to exactly the same endless chase. So, it's not wrong but it's not sufficient for the more general malady.

Good enough is live music. If you don’t want that then this is not your hobby. Just be happy find something else. It takes huge investment to get close to that. But as an audio file, it’s even better than that, because we also listen for pleasure so things are not shaped accurately. They are shaped more for listening pleasure.

if I put you in a race car, you’re not gonna like driving it! if I put you in a Bentley you’re going to like it a lot more, but that’s what it equates to, in terms of costs.