I'm smiling a little at the different perspectives folk have. I'm remember tube designs from the mid 1970s-early 80s when I was just qualified and in TV, where I went first, valves were things we wanted to get rid of. The heat, the distortion, the shortish life were negatives, and I was rather pleased when the first solid state designs appeared that didn't suffer from the negatives as we saw them. The degradation in the scope traces from source to destination and the changes that happen during warm up each time and eventually lifespan with gains dropping. Going the other way were guitar amp designs, utilising one industry's problems and turning them into features. We now have the same thing with specific products designed to modify sound in wonderful ways, and very clever they are. One person's negatives turned into another person's positives. I just wish we didn't try to use words like 'better'. It's like decibels. Meaningless without context, plus it suggests a difference. Sound A is better than sound B, for whatever reason. We don't have a specification for better we can use. One person can slam a signal with every compression device they have and consider on their sound, that it's better. Another wants to remove every trace of signal distortion, and that to them is better too. Total harmonic distortion used to be a designator of 'goodness', while now some distortion is considered good, and others bad. In the tape days we hated hiss, got annoyed by what hiss removal systems did to the sound and elimination of it became a focus. Then hiss went away and we started to look for other annoyances.
I suppose we all have our hates and our goals to achieve. The snag seems to be we want to convince other people their viewpoint is the bad one, and ours solid. Tube mics are to me a bit pointless - I appreciate what they do, but that's just not my direction. I do have in the studio a valve combo. I never use it. It's not bad, but the solid state ones do what I need. I'm more interested in the annoying clicks I'm getting and the increase in background noise with no signal that was not there before. Far more important to fix.