Has anyone else auditioned something that really was terrible?

Or, come to think about it, they might have concluded the speakers sucked, or McIntosh sucked, not realizing more power would have changed everything.

Because it doesn’t work in your system doesn’t mean it’s a terrible product. Maybe something it’s matched with in your system is a terrible match and its performance is severely compromised, but I wouldn’t go around claiming it to be a terrible product. I doubt in this day and age you’ll  find anyone building a terrible product. That being said, I’ve no doubt there are manufacturers who build products that are way overpriced for their performance vs cost. Even then I wouldn’t call it a terrible product; maybe way overpriced.

Though it's not an amplifier, I think the worst hifi product I ever heard was the Bertagni panel speaker back in the mid-1970s. I like Magnapans, Quads and most other panel speakers I’ve heard, but these failed horridly.

Am I just spoiled?

Hope not. You are probably just what you should be: discriminating. Audiophiles ought to have high standards. Not be running around buying one thing after another. Making fool statements and excuses like it might not work in every system. As if anything magically knows whether to sound good or not based on what else its connected to. Yet this is what passes for advice around here.

The vast, vast majority of stuff is crap. At every price level. Crap. Its just very, very hard to figure out what is good. A lot of which has to do with nonsense advice like it might not work in your system. So people buy crap that they can live with, but because its crap it has some glaring faults, which they then try and cover up with other stuff, because someone told them this is called system matching and something they are suppose to do. What utter nonsense.

What you are supposed to do is what you are doing. You read and research and winnow down to a few and then actually audition the few. Which inevitably you find are not what they were cracked up to be. Do this enough and you get so GD good at reading and analyzing that you almost never bring anything even remotely crappy home. But this takes a long time. Decades.

This is not called being spoiled. Far from it. This is called being competent, being a good listener, being selective. Its a virtue not a sin.
https://systems.audiogon.com/systems/8367