Do we really need anything greater than 24/96? Opinions?

No we don't. 20/88 would be more than sufficient. 16/44.1 when played on the right DAC still sounds awesome.

Abraxalito , I agree though my suggestion a few comments back was ignored , lol , regarding Tonian Labs recordings which are by far the most realistic sounding percussion recordings I’ve heard to date ,
Hi-res streaming , DVD audio , HDCD and what have you , ive listened to countless excellent recordings, with some of the very best talked about in audio media and online that come close to Tonian labs 16/44 recordings but so far no equals .
Borrow or buy a copy and listen for yourself.

https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

44.1/16 is enough for any stage in the signal chain, even more so at the playback. Some oversampling at the mastering/AD/DA conversion -sure. 24 bit is because of lazy/sloppy engineers. Good recording/mastering is key. The above article by good old Monty still holds. Human ears and the the sampling theorem haven’t evolved over the past couple of years.

Is the Earth flat and in the center of the universe? Opinions?

Going purely based on research evidence, the evidence suggests that Redbook is not sufficient, but 24/96 is: http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=18296
The paper is not perfect (nor the studies it references) and even its justification for 24/96 is quite weak, but with rapidly shrinking storage/bandwidth costs, there is not a lot of reason not to standardize on 24/96.

Somewhere I have a link that showed slightly better timing discrimination in some subjects, with a bandwidth just slightly over 20KHz, but virtually no benefit to going much higher than this. This would also suggest Redbook may not be perfect for everyone, but 24/96 would cover everyone.

You can always take away information at the playback stage if you are worried about distortion at >20KHz.