That is pretty much the way I see it as well. Learning how to set up the audio portion of an HT is relatively easy and once you get the hang of it, you can adjust it for any reason required, sometimes to the point of driving yourself insane with tweaking this and that looking for the last tidbit of extra sound possible.
The video portion can even be done by yourself to a certain extent, as there are a couple of sites on the web that have professional calibration settings listed for flat panel tv's.
Tweak TV is one of them