According to acoustics and psychoacoustics researcher Earl Geddes, the in-room bass smoothness increases in proportion to the number of independent bass sources. So two subs can theoretically be twice as smooth in-room as one sub; four subs can theoretically be twice as smooth as two, and so on. "Independent" in this context means that the subwoofer locations are acoustically completely and significantly dissimilar, and in practice that just about never actually happens; for instance even if both subwoofers are placed asymmetrically with respect to the walls, both of them are probably still on the floor, thus they are both the same distance from the floor and ceiling.
That being said, imo two subs intelligently distributed will make a very much worthwhile improvement in in-room smoothness versus only having one sub. Ime a steep-slope low-pass filter (like 4th order) can be very helpful for rapidly rolling off the top end of any subs which are positioned well away from the main speakers.
And "smoother" bass = "faster" bass, subjectively as well as literally, because it is the in-room bass peaks which take longer to decay into inaudibility and which therefore muddy the bass response.
Improvements in smoothness in the bass region pay disproportionately large dividends. This is because our ears have a heightened sensitivity to changes in SPL in the bass region, which is shown by the way equal-loudness curves bunch up south of 100 Hz. A 5 dB peak in the 40 Hz region can be comparable in perceived loudness to a 10 dB peak at 1 kHz!
The improvement in bass smoothness tends to extend throughout the room, which makes equalization more likely to be an improvement over a large listening area. With just one sub, equalization tends to fix problems in one location at the expense of making things worse elsewhere. So two (or more) subs intelligently distributed have the added benefit of making equalization beneficial across a larger area.
Duke (manufacturer of a four-subwoofer system)