Art Dudley Calls B.S. but without naming names - PLEASE DO!

It all boils down to the delta in the competing concepts of "form follows function" vs. "style and flair in a luxury good has a price of its own". Take a stroll down 5th Ave in NYC or Rodea Dr. in Beverly Hills and you see the purest examples of the latter-Gucci, Tiffany, Patek, et al. Not everyone cares to wear Dockers and a Timex watch and use handbags made of canvas. At times, I came very close to buying a pair of Quicksilver monoblocks and the now discontinued Quicksilver Full Function preamp but the barebones cosmetics were just too much for me to overcome. I don't like seeing prominent capacitors jutting out of a chassis with what looks like a chrome hose clamp holding down the cap in plain view. Does it fulfill it's function without compromise? Yes. Should it bother me? No. But something between strictly utilitarian and pure bling is a valid consumer choice. Thanks to the new parent company of ARC with hefty Italian ownership, ARC recently offered two functionally identical amps, one full of bling and one almost devoid of it with the GS150 and the Ref 150SE. The Galileo Series version in unquestionably beautiful but the tariff for the bling was ~$4000 from $15,000 to $19,000 IIRC. The marketplace voted and the GS150 was discontinued. What if ARC had not offered the Ref 150SE and the only option to get the amp would have been the bling version? We will never know. 
Art eschews complication for the sake of complication and values simplicity and durability. Those are noble ideals. But things are not that simple. He loves the aesthetics of Shindo gear and he is not alone. If it were identical functionally but ugly (let's imagine for a minute that it were pink and shaped like a frisbee), he would not own it. 

Of course you do. Disagreement on this Board (and most others) is about as endemic as smoking among Israeli twenty-somethings. What Art would and would not buy or put in his own living room is not the point. 
The point is that a segment of what we consider the high end audio consumer segment will buy spartan looking gear like Class-D monoblocks in small plain black boxes and Sandy Gross' Triton line of speakers in cock-socks and another segment has to have this "beauty" https://www.mcintoshlabs.com/products/turntables/MT10#gallery-1. You might disagree, but most would believe that John DeVore's fiddleback mahogany finish on the front baffles of the O Series speakers helps them sell, and are certainly appreciated to offset/accent those plain paper woofers.