Am I the only one who thinks B&W is mid-fi?

Tvad, I think one eventually gets to the point in audio where happiness has more to do with what's going on inside your head than outside.

After talking with other people, here's a ththought about Nautilus. First I get don't measure a spike at 80 and 10,000 hz as Mikez says. And the BBC dip at the presence region is measured anechoic and may make actual in-room response more flat. In any event, compared to Merlin VSM, instruments and vocals aren't as actile like they are right in room. So I don't know if the frequency response is the reason.
But B&W runs the midrange into breakup because of the high crossover frequency. As shown at the B&W site, the driver produces a broad band type of pink noise at breakup which may raise the noise floor of the speaker.
I thought it had to do with the compliance of Kevlar vs metal making the fuzzy sound. But it may be the breakup mode instead. So the weave of the driver reduces harmonic distortion to 1% or less but converts the distortion into "pink noise".
I was disappointed to hear PSB Image 4T's sound clearer than my B&W. Clearer but not as clean. Meaning there was more distortion. So maybe it's a tradeoff. Thiels are clear but Stereophile, for example, always seems to find some fault. Maybe poor design or maybe the clarity is a double edged sword.
I realize many people find B&W bright. This may be a setup thing. They are bright compared to Dynaudio, Silverline, and Reynaud. For the record, I have never had anyone ever complaint my Nautilus is bright. On good recordings, there are sort of bland. But they make poor recordings listenable and still invite me to listen into the music which is important to me. Auditioning other speakers dealers have complained about my bad recordings but they actually sound okay on B&W. But maybe the "mid-fi" sound could also be because of their lack of razor sharp clarity and/or distortion.
But I find they are less bright than other studio monitors, other than ATC, Alesis, and KRK. Talking with a recording engineer, he told me he'd rather have a bright speaker and eq. it down than try to brighten up a dark speaker. So for real studio monitors brightness is a better alternative.

The only B&W speakers I have used are a little set of 550 (6.5 inch woofer in sealed box and titanium dome tweeter). These were when my living accomodations were greatly downsized. I now have an array if three MG 1.6, plus other stuff, and I like that setup.

However, I must say that those little boxes reproduce one thing, a violin, better than any speaker I have ever heard.

Possible reasons are (a) The baffle size is just about the same as a violin. (b) The Titanium tweeter has a slightly metalic sound, that resembles the violin's metal A and E strings (the two highest of four).

original B/W 801 speakers with crossover mods sound simply wonderful..the later 802 was very good, too; but, that was 25 years ago....

FWIW, in response to the original poster's "I am getting tired of people buying for the name, not the sound." I'd just like to say both my wife and I used our ears (and to a certain extent my wife's aesthetic sense!) to decide both our surround sound speakers and hi-fi speakers.
She had never heard of any of the names on offer and I wasn't familair with the brands and in both instances, at our (mid-range) price point the result came out B&W.