I’m curious, have you done an ABX test recently? My wife swore up and down she could hear the difference too. An ABX test with expensive headphones in a quiet room across a few different genres and bitrates showed that she couldn’t.
For reference, I listen to mostly Pantera, Beethoven, Pink Floyd, early Nine Inch Nails, Led Zep. It's not too diverse, but there is a short period from about 1990 to 2005 where music recorded in that period does not transfer to MP3 well. Maybe because the digital artifacts that we cannot hear in the published recordings are amplified in the compressed MP3 - but after that period producers began to optimize their recordings to account for that.
Though I'm sure that the encoders got better, really, the quality of the common rip has not.
By the way, I once made a GUI for abcde called abcdefg (A Better CD Encoder For Gnome) but never did anything with it - it was really just an exercise to learn the GTK libraries because Zim Wiki used them too. But I now regret not publishing it just because it had such a cool name.