There’s so much to say about all this, but I neither have the time nor the patience, so I’ll settle with this:
Bad hearing will lead to bad mixes, and fast doesn’t very often mean good. There is no such thing as “diamond ears”, only more or less well-trained ears. Even people with damaged hearing can often compensate in their monitoring to some degree, reaching great results by knowing what they do and why.
Regarding the quality of gear though- spending too much time on anything for no good reason is not good either, and where I’ve historically spent an insane amount of time and energy working on cheaper consumer-friendly stuff to reach results that transfer well everywhere years before, things virtually mix themselves now that I only use a much smaller but much more reliable and well-sounding collection of software and hardware.
And this is why I love Nuendo - it has always been at least one step ahead of the competition, always evolving tremendously each release. Making work much easier and reducing tweak-time a lot.
Higher sound quality=less time spent working reaching higher results than physically possible using crabby tools.
And yes - when I started out in the early/mid 90’s there were a lot of discussions among sound-people regarding the quality of stuff, pros and cons. At that time you couldn’t even really use a BASF tape on a reel-to-reel machine calibrated for AMPEX without a world of problems, but everyone knew that because if you didn’t know what tape-bias was no studio would hire you. Actually, most of us even tried as far as possible to only work with tapes from the exact same batch because every batch was slightly but still apparently different by nature. That’s the analogue way. Much easier to calibrate to a new batch than to calibrate to a new brand though when the old one ran out. Myself, it was AMPEX 456 that ran through our reels, both 2" 24ch and 1/4" 2 ch.