First, thanks for contributing to this thread and you hit on a lot of interesting points.
Most hi-fi enthusiasts struggle to get 2-channel systems really dialed in.
It is a "kaizen" experience, a continuous pursuit of perfection until you hit "good enough". One of the things I learned in this thread is for a lot of members, the stereo is preferred even over live music.
Allocating virtually any budget across two channels will result in better sound quality than twelve
See the first comment of yours above in italics., it almost makes it insurmountable, if two channels are a struggle twelve would be almost impossible. I agree and that takes it back to why I started this thread, how do you allocate budget so you can play the file of choice from your streaming service. Fortunately Dolby has standards that are easy to follow, I have a thread here that discusses setup in detail.
I’ve seen zero evidence that most artists are adopting object-based audio.
Well their are plenty of engineers posting about mixing (see youtube), plenty of studios posting about converting to Atmos (see mixonline) and as for content just pull it up on tidal, apple, or amazon music, its HUGE and growing every month. As for your point about the financial side of it I have a four letter reply, AAPL. When the elephant in the room buys into spatial audio do you want to just ignore it if you are a content producer? I posted a video in this thread by producer Steve Wilson who discusses this.
I want to be supportive; however, I sincerely hope that all of the various object-based solutions for music will die as fast as they arrived.
Point taken, better that even a good format goes away before you sink a ton of dough into it. Some people were bummed their $10K turntables were out of style in 1995, that turned around though right? The reason I took the risk is because unlike SACD or DVD-A I already had access to tons of content (that I liked, unlike SACD) and it was included without a markup, so I said, why not? Now, I already had a 9.1 HT so it was a chip shot, new processor and I added more speakers gradually. If I got an incremental cost effective improvement I kept going. Now I just smile a lot and hit my happy place.
And don’t get me started on Dolby Atmos for headphones and soundbars.
You know who turned me on to the headphones, a member here who I really respect. All because of a thread like this, you never know.