How important is low W & F performance anyway?

Published specs vs actual measured performance is another issue, but is related to this discussion.  One of the DD tables in question has a published W&F spec of 0.008% but measures 100x worse at 0.8%, yet still receives rave reviews from the press and public.  So: Do specs for W&F (or measured performance) even matter at this point?

The other table in question sells for more than $50K and has a laughable W&F spec of 1PPM (0.0001%) but actually measured 0.16%.  Again, nothing but praise from the listening tests.  One would have to conclude that specs are irrelevant since mfrs can claim almost anything they want with impunity and the fact that reviewers and owners of these tables have nothing but good things to say about the sound leads me to believe that even tables with lousy W&F performance apparently sound good to just about everyone.

The Monaco Gran Prix 3.0 says their DD table W&F is so low it can't be measured (odd, because the previous DD table published a 1PPM W&F spec even though I've never seen an instrument or software with that kind of resolution).

Maybe the reason these numbers are meaningless is because the W&F of the recording process would most likely swamp any W&F contribution from a decent table.  Even the first DD example (0.8%) which is undoubtedly worse than the cutting lathe would not add a significant amount of temporal distortion.

Are we witnessing what happened in the 70's & 80's with amplifier distortion figures that got vanishingly smaller yet the sound was indistinguishable between competing components?

I have SOTA's Quasar with RoadRunner and Eclipse Motor/ Controller.   It is an awesome table.  Sounds fantastic.   It's obvious speed stability lends to it's great sound I believe.  If there is W&F it is not audible. 

A great table for the money.  Love it.  

Raises several questions:

• At what level is it noticeable?
• Does system transparency affect noticeability? 
• Does listening ability affect noticeability?

@OP. There are two factors at issue here. The first, if I understand you correctly, is that you claim that your measurements differ from the manufacturer's published specifications - please correct me if I am wrong in that.

But it would be helpful if you could go into more detail about your measurement protocol. I presume you have an NDA with the company you were working for but it would also be helpful if you could provide details of the other two turntables - their manufacturer specification and your measurements.

The second thing is that like everything in audio, singling out specific performance measurements can be misleading because system performance  (i.e. the total performance of the device) is what really matters.