> Keep in mind that the smaller the hearing loss the more sophisticated the hearing aid you need to get a benefit. If you have a slight hearing loss you will experience issues in the "hardest" situations for hearing aids to cope with such as conversations in noisy places or bad telephone reception.

I wonder if improving performance would make hearing aids become a "want" rather than a "need"? Bionic ears outperforming natural ones, allowing the user to select different bands/ranges to listen to, sounds like a pretty neat futuristic thing to have.

It's not like people are shy about enhancing their natural abilities with the help of technology, it's pretty much in the current zeitgeist.