When CDs first came onto the market in 1982 .......

I bought a new Linn turntable when CDs came out in order to preserve my investment in records and not have to replace many of them.

To me CD playback was more user friendly than vinyl, however with a well set up budget however high end TT vinyl sounded better. I still own the Sonograph SG3 with Sumiko tonearm TT that I used back at that time. 

Now I am totally digital. Playing CDs via transport.  

I remember the moment well. I was working in a wholesale/retail record store, which had a separate classical store. If you were reading the audio magazines at the time, you already knew that something big was coming - the CD. Since the classical world was really into clean audio, this new form of technology was being promoted to benefit classical music fans in a big way. This classical music store put its first CD player on display, and urged and encouraged classical music customers to audition it with their small selection of classical CD’s. The CD player was the Philips CD100, and it was the first CD player I ever heard, however, the first CD I listened to on the CD player was Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark. The minute I heard the audio of this CD through headphones, I knew this was a monumental step in audio. To me, the audio was nothing but mind-blowing.

To this day, I am still a fan of CD’s, and don’t mind saying that I play them regularly. It is with my CD players that I discovered how big of a difference different RCA interconnects can make.

Philips CD100 (Vintage)

I attribute the sound issues of brightness and sterility to be the fact that the DACs were still immature technology. Some of those early CDs sound pretty good on more modern players we have today.

True, but it was immature process as well.  Some records, used to make CDs had wrong frequency correction - intended for LPs. In addition many records got digitized with less than perfect A/D clock producing jitter, that cannot be removed.  The only way to remove it is to digitize again, if analog tapes still exist.   

As for different volume - I suspect that "volume wars" were a necessity, since CDs were, because of size, widely used in boom boxes, cars etc. where full dynamics of recordings were not welcomed (buzzing speakers).   Same way TV sound is horribly compressed since most of people used tiny TV's speakers.

SACD, intended for better reproduction, had ability to bring back full original dynamics, but greed pretty much killed the project.  Todays LPs also carry this promise, but world also seems to go in the opposite direction with more people listening to MP3s.