A similar analogy in terms of what people perceive be cilantro, to roughly half the population cilantro taste good, to the other half (me included) it taste like soap. A flavor I am all to familiar with because of the potty mouth I had as a kid.
My hearing is awful. Each year when I get my physical, my internist checks everything, hearing and vision included, and each year his nurse or tech that is giving me the hearing test thinks their machine is broken because I can't hear any of the high pitch test tones they are playing. I do ok hearing speech as long as there's not too much background commotion, but there's a range of frequencies that I can't hear, because of that I know that I hear specific pieces of music and specific qualities of certain pieces of equipment differently than others.
I recently bought a well reviewed and regarded piece of gear to add to my system. I really want to like it, but I am beginning to think that I may have to move on to something else because to my ears it doesn't sound that pleasant. Unfortunately I think the problem may be that I have gotten my system to a point that it is quite a bit more transparent and revealing than what I have ever had before, but with my hearing deficiencies I may need it to be colored a bit to keep from sounding harsh and brittle to me. I'll do some gear swapping to test my hypothesis, if it bears out than to me that higher value - more revealing gear may be of less value than that mid range piece of kit that smooths things out a bit.