......."Its wrong to blame the AEs and MEs. A guys gotta work. And if the clients are demanding loud and you don't deliver, they will go hire someone who will......."
THAT is the most intelligent phrase spoken on most of this entire thread.
If you work at McDonalds and you start giving me a hard time about what I'm ordering, you're not going to get my business. And no doubt, you'll get fired in the process.
This isn't remotely like McDonalds? Is mastering not a business? Do the clients not order what they want and then sign off on the projects once they get what they want? Including these so-called butchered mastering jobs?
You guys who say things like "my mastering", "my mixes", "blame this guy", "this mastering guy butchered this poor artist's recording", "blame those guys", "things should be like this", "should be like that", "this is ruined", "that is ruined", "need to do this", "need to do that"...NO...these are not "your" mixes, these are not "your" mastering works.
These works, these projects, these preferences, belong to the people who created the work, or own it because they paid for it, and are writing the check to you to have you to master the project. And if they say "hotter", "Odb on everything", "squash it to make it as loud as these other 5000 projects, WHO ARE YOU to argue? WHO ARE YOU to say, "but look at this waveform". WHO ARE YOU to say, "but if I do this, your record won't have dynamic range just like all the other records that don't have dynamic range".
If I bring a work to you to master under the above terms and you give me a hard time, guess what? You are not going to get my business. Period. I don't come to you to "educate" me. I come to you to do a task that needs to be done under certain parameters. And if you meet those parameters and I sign off on the work...end of subject. If I'm a young artist who wants product as insanely loud and flattened as possible, and when I hear the finished "flattened" mastering job and decide, yeah, "It's loud and reminds me of the other stuff I want to compete with", WHO ARE YOU to argue? If I say, do whatever to make it as loud as anything on the planet, and if I then sign off on your squash-job, WHO ARE YOU to condemn?
If you don't like the way certain styles of records are mastered, stop looking at their waveforms. Stop listening to that style. Stop listening and looking at any smashed masters from any style. Stop accepting these types of jobs (if you're even being offered any) and go do some jazz or classical or something where you're working with a style that's recorded under the parameters YOU like and where you're surrounded by a bunch of people who WANT you to master the way YOU want to.
And, if you're not an ME, if you're just Joe-blow sitting on the outside blowing philosophy and psychology around, condemning ME's for the condition of recordings that ARTISTS and project OWNERS are PAYING to have done that way, you are severly out of touch with reality.