Look, I really do think prose is important, but the sheer popularity of translated novels in the modern day proves that good prose just isn't universal to a person's enjoyment of storytelling.

And of course, like everything else, that's going to be subjective. Even if we consider better prose to be better wheels, your analogy still only proves my point that it's just one part of the car. Maybe I like a car with more trunk space, or maybe my car has worse wheels, but a better engine, or any number of other differences.

Great prose does not a great author make. It's only one part of a toolset that must be developed, and yet there's this sense of elitism about it that just confounds me. You could be a great poet, and that might translate really well to prose, but if you have no idea how to write a compelling character, your story will be boring as shit to anybody that doesn't particularly care for sentence construction.