How does this indict the whole field? All it does is reinforce the idea that to be exposed to new ideas, one has to seek them out. Luckily, SF is almost constantly being renewed by new authors with fresh ideas.

The best thing about turning over the idiotic copyright extensions would be that we could legally undo all of the awful changes Lucas made to what was perfectly fine in the first place.

First, the quality is not "better than standard radio". That's marketing hype. Second, you don't have to be a "music elitist" to dislike the loss in fidelity inherent to lossy encoding schemes, you only have to have a set of ears and to have been exposed to decent speakers. But if your idea of of hi-fi is a four-letter word that starts with "B", I can certainly understand why you hold this opinion.