Just taking your argument further, Just because a designer can build a toob amp, does not mean they can build an analog output stage. Both can happen and thus your point is?
Generalizations always end up being one offs and not true in actuality. That is the nature of this hobby.
The bolded point, in your post, is not objective but subjective and your whole post is that way. Nothing wrong with that, mind you, but we are trying to discuss objectively. Jes saying.
There is plenty of information out on the idea that tones, beyond out hearing range, CAN in fact affect the way we hear things.
Well I am not a big fan of toobs or SS or anything else - I am a fan of what sounds good. Ah Tjoeb! was one of the first tube CD players I heard and I kinda hated it. Easter Electric made a SS and tube DAC and many/most preferred the SS section including me.
Most tube CD players simply stick some tubes after some OPamps and the tube serves as a buffer to basically add a bunch of distortion to the signal. None of this applies to Audio Note or Border Patrol CD players which are rather entirely different animals.
Objectively we can run a DBT and all one needs to do is go to a local university with a music department and gather up 30 classical and or jazz trained musicians under the age of 40 (likely to still have good hearing) and take out a few hotel rooms and give all listeners a card - they listen to two or three rooms and drop their card in a box of the room they felt recreated music properly and add up the scores. The systems are blacked out and both rooms played at the same volume.
It's why when faced with measurements arguments I point out that no feedback amplifiers tend to ALWAYS win. Heck Martin Colloms had top SS designers bring their top of the line SS amplifiers (like Meridian and Naim etc) and they included a low feedback tube amp and ALL the SS designers chose the tube amp over ALL the SS amps including the ones they designed and were selling!
And it's not just about tubes - the Sugden A21a has also been in several such tests and came out on top and it measures similar to a SET. Class A.
The point is - and John Atkinson makes it all the time - the measurements (of the best kind) don't equate correlationally as sounding better to gear of the poor measuring variety.
That's why I tend to always bring up Audio Note CD players because they are typically the worst measuring in the entire audio industry (try to find worse). No jitter reduction of any kind, no error correction, no clock matching, fairly high distortion, no over/upsampling etc etc. And consistently picked (even by engineers and people who worked to design SACD) and Recording and Mastering engineers like Steve Hoffman (Beatles, Doors, Dylan, Pink Floyd, Eva Cassidy, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Frank Sinatra --- ahh not a no name hack) has an AN DAC. (and a PS Audio for that matter).
This is why it is fascinating - these two would be "completely" at opposite ends of the audio spectrum in terms of design and measurements. So I go back to the listening audition because if AN wins award after award after award and wins blind level matched session all the time with the WORST measurements then it indicates that measurements are not giving you jack squat knowledge as to whether it will sound better.
And on top of those crappy CD measurements - you feed that into a SET amp for even more worse measurements into "mediocre" speaker measurements.
PS I started out as a Bryston/Krell/PMC/Genelec/B&W sorta guy. Bomb proof measurements. Meh.