Well it seems to me that characterizing something superior/inferior is directly related to the goal in question.
Take the designers behind the M22 and liken them to an Indy car race team. Their whole goal is to produce the 'perfect' race car. And in that pursuit a big determining factor is how much usable horsepower the engine can achieve. So when they run off 1000+ ponies on the dyno-meter they're going to feel very good about it.
Now take the engineers who put together the Energy CB20's and liken them to the team responsible with developing the Toyota Prius. They could care less about how fast they can get around a track 100 times. Their whole objective is to get their car to go 100 miles on a single gallon of gas.
So when the Indy race team gets ahold of the Prius dyno-chart and laugh because their 'inferior' car only made 90 horsepower, well that doesn't mean diddly squat to the Prius guys. They never set out to produce huge horsepower figures in the first place. Their definition of 'inferior' is completely different. They would laugh at the Indy car only getting 8 miles to the gallon!
Different strokes for different folks. It's pretty obvious that not every speaker manufacturer on the market is dedicated to producing the most accurate speaker they can. That's because the is a HUGE market for 'warm' speakers. It's a simple law of business that companies must make products that consumers demand and will purchase... or you won't be doing business for very long.
So yes there is a demand for Axioms as well as other brands that reproduce an audio signal faithfully. But there's certainly just as much demand for Bose and others who color the signal. Therefore I have a hard time throwing a word like 'inferior' at them when they have a different goal and have taken a different path in achieving that goal.
And this business that, "the way the engineer intended the recording to sound is the best" is just as subjective as anything else IMO. Hell nature's intentions were for me to enjoy my life to the fullest unaltered... But I've found that the occasional beer gives life a nice, warm 'color' that makes normal life seem boring in comparison!
