The $27,900 disappointment? Wilson Audio Watt Puppy 8 issues.

All good engineering makes certain assumptions about the intended applications and audience for a product. It’s completely valid for Wilson to take the approach they have - for the sound quality they were trying to achieve, the context of the time perdiod, their intended audience

This. Wilson makes choices with their design, they arent flaws (to them). They create their speakers to function optimally within a given system, even if it means they wont perform as well in a different system.  They’re building a product that is designed to work with high quality components because thats what their customers will have. 
As a Wilson owner, if you asked me if I would be willing to sacrifice some performance in my setup, so that my speakers would sound better in a lower end setup, I would obviously be against that. I didnt buy them so that I could connect them to a mass market amplifier and I wouldnt expect anybody else would either. 

No one with expensive high quality speakers would drive these with cheap electronics. This isnt the issue. The issue is if Wilson can achieve the same quality of sound making the speakers higher impedance with a more refined curve. As it stands Wilson is excluding a great number of amps on the market because they cant drive lower impedance loads.

I should add that Wilson has been very successful to date with some idiosyncratic performance issues so I cant blame the son for not changing much on the new designs. Thank goodness he changed the tweeter.

It’s the people who have never actually owned Wilsons who seem to criticize them the most. As an owner of the WATT/Puppy system all the way back to 1986 (Puppies came out in 1988), I found little to criticize other than an overly tight treble,  and congestion on big crescendos (Prokofiev's Scythian Suite could sound very bright on the first generation WATTs).

Otherwise, having lived with them for 12 years, I don’t seem to have heard all the "flaws" that so many others have. Funny, innit?? People who’ve heard a speaker for - perhaps - 10 hours total have more to say about them (and not positive comments!!!) than those who have owned it for decades.

Well I think this is not surprising. Those who are attracted to this sound buy the speakers and those that arent dont.