>give consumers the ability to trade off visual (and audio) fidelity for usability on the system they have
They are able to for the video. You just think the tradeoff is too great.
With my OLED, I'm yet to see a scene in a movie where it is too dark to be able to tell what's going on. I agree that too many movies are too dark for pleasurable viewing though.
So I think if you bought a crappy TV then you can't see it properly, if you bought a good TV then you just find it a bit dark.
Unfortunately, with the audio complaints however, everyone is suffering, even people who bought high end systems.
I have a medium-high end calibrated 5.1 surround system with a sub. I still have the volume issues like everyone else, having to turn it up to hear the dialog and then having to turn it down for loud scenes so I don't blow the doors off.
Thousands of dollars worth of speakers and I still have to turn subtitles on to understand the audio sometimes.
So the annoying sound is clearly an "artistic" choice, or incompetence by the directors to ruin the audio for everyone.
But I don't think every single scene has to be bright just because some people bought systems that can't display dark scenes properly.
I agree to an extent with you, but regarding the visuals, because I use an OLED the dark scenes don't bother me much, so because it's adequate for me, I think it could be argued that there you have made a tradeoff with the equipment you bought. Sometimes I watch movies on my IPS PC monitor and that is bearable too.
With audio, there's no amount you can spend to make it adequate.
I'll put it this way, I find the audio nowadays much more terrible than the video.
I don't know why directors insist on annoying people in every way available to them though. It should be their job to make good movies, and a movie is about audio and video. So they're literally bad at major parts of their job.
It seems to be a fairly recent thing though. I wonder why this is happening?
Why do modern directors want to piss off their customers??