@mikem I don't disagree.
I don't care about fidelity or neutrality, I care about sounding "good" to my ears. The problem with any preamp. passives included is that its a stab in the dark. I can't seem to find my SYS (may have loaned it out and forgot about it) as I wanted to run it and see, overall, what things sound like. I can tell you that in my current tubed stage, the warmest tubes I've had (Mullard 4024's) were my favorite and even the 6201's (slightly less warm) were less engaging for me. So it seems to me that my system is neutral to cool excluding the line stage (although my amp is known to be on the warm side) and that the warmest its sounded was the happiest I was with it.
So at this point I am contemplating buy another SYS (hate to do that obviously) to get a feel for what the overall tonality is (though yes I know it isn't matched to my components or have transformers so will be dry and thin to a degree). I can say for certain that extreme low gain/unity gain/passive is where I'm headed as I have way too much again already. Outside of that I am falling down the rabbit hole with speed.