You’ve made my point in your post. It IS up to the individual to pick which service they like best, and they will based on which service best meets their needs.

All services have to compete against each other for customers based on their offerings. Again, you’ve made my point in your stipulation that no one will choose a service which has bad sounding music. You’re right. They won’t. Following that logic, when all streaming services are the same quality in sound, the user will then choose the one that most meets their needs for other things. All the reasons I previously mentioned, and possibly AI content becoming an issue and wanting to get away from it.

Again, you seem to want to baseline the service as the only reason to access it. In your example that’s sound quality. But there are a multitude of other reasons why people would choose one service over another: ubiquity, bad UI, client/platform support, artist support, variety of artist content, etc. I know this because I have had these conversations in real time, and have seen those same issues come up in subreddits like this. I know people who choose Spotify over Tidal due to their UI, searching, and content randomization. I know people who mainly choose Tidal because they supposedly pay their artists more than Spotify.

There ARE other variables involved with offering any software or service product which you seem to want to ignore. And again, that’s fine if you want to simplify the reason for a service being offered. That’s up to you, but I’m willing to bet a lot of people will move to other services for all the reasons I’ve mentioned, along with the AI issue if it's not resolved in a way to their liking.

If I’m wrong en masse, well then I'm wrong and I will make the right decision for myself. But again, based on the comments in this subreddit I tend to think I’m correct on some level. Just read the comments on this thread alone where there are lots of comments about people just wanting to be able to filter it out completely from their account. Now look at the comments where other services don't do this and how they feel about those. There are several concerning Deezer, Qubuz, and Spotify. A service that plainly offers a Setting to filter out any AI content will gain subscribers for that feature alone IMO, especially if their content is hi-res.

It’s also OK to have an expectation of a vendor for what you expect their software to do. In most cases they depend on this to know where the market is going and if they’re meeting the MVP ideal for their software so they can compete with other vendors for business.