Speaker priority: high or low???

Speakers are much more than "tone controls". They are the imperfect acoustic interface for all the "upstream" components. They are electrical-mechanical transducers with high mass and relatively large nonlinearities and other distortions compared to the electronic components in the system. Even with relatively "low-fi" electronic components, speakers are usually the most limiting factor in an audio system. Consequently, only with better speakers can you take fuller advantage of upgrades made elsewhere in the system.

Now, I am just a fat little boy who works for a cheese company, but in my experience, I can live (and sometimes quite well) with lesser speakers, if they are driven with better electronics. The reverse is not true. My main system is posted. I have swapped out my main speakers (5 driver tri-wired) for Warfdale Diamond 6's (2 way, single run, $149 a pair)(I admit, they have been modified). Once they were setup properly, the Warfdale speaker gave me most of what the main speakers do, with the exception of the lower registers.
If the truth be known, I fall into the Beemer camp of balanced systems, but I am willing to play. I would be much more inclined to live with speakers that were designed with some trade-offs and no glaring errors, as opposed to something better that revealed more of the trade-offs up-stream.
Again, this is just me.

Speakers come first. Then tweak / upgrade the sound with better amplifier.

Of course you can't take this too far because ultra-revealing speakers will show upstream component's faults.

Amplification is hard to explain. The differences are subtle but bad amplification can be very wearing over time.

I never considered the "Speakers are the most important because they are the most flawed" philosophy. There is merit to this.

Squidboyw (Is he really fat?) throws the interesting spanner into the works. Comments like this have been made in the past. Is it possible they are without merit? I did not hear his experiment so I cannot comment with any credibility about the results. If he really heard that level of quality from his admittedly modified Wharfdale Diamonds what does this say about our pursuit of the perfect speaker?

I have long had the opinion that in a balanced system the speakers are the least important componant. This is obviously not to say that speakers are not important. There is no sound without them, although there is no sound without any other componant. I may have to rethink my conclusion but I doubt I will change my mind.

I'm am not an engineer so I actually know little about speaker design. Is it really that hard to design a speaker without major flaws and compromises? Just like amplifiers, there are so many designs and philosophies behind the speakers. Stereophile commented several years ago when when two very popular amplifiers of extremely different design came out that "If one these amplifiers is right than the other must be wrong." The problem was they both sounded great to their reviewer. I think they were a Krell and a Jolida, not that it matters.

So anyway should speakers be moved up on the list of priorities or are they where they should be?

I have always been in the "source is most important" camp. I have had excellent results with my systems using that format, and expect to continue in that vein. I definitely consider speakers to be important, but the source is where its at. When you can bring more music into the system, it is amazing what comes out the other end. I would never buy expensive speakers if I didn't already have my source maximized. I, like Squiddy, have had very enjoyable systems where the speakers were quite modest, but the source, and amps, made them play to their maximum capability, and they sounded alot more like high end speakers than many would have believed. I used to back up a pair of Linn Kans with $7500 worth of source/electronics when I lived in an apartment, and believe me, they didn't sound like what you would expect from a $795 pair of mini-monitors.