I do subscribe to the "music enjoyed during your formative/more emotionally-intense years tends to imprint on you" theory... ...but at least for me, the combo

I do subscribe to the "music enjoyed during your formative/more emotionally-intense years tends to imprint on you" theory... ...but at least for me, the combo of ubiquitous instrument/vocal quantizing and loudness-war compression really does turn me off to much of modern pop music. Still, that may just be because it doesn't sound like the stuff I had already "trained my model" of good music on. I prefer a little bit of swing in my drums compared to playing to a grid. I like albums that sound like people playing in a room rather than people plugged into a DAW. But I also don't have any logical reason why one is better than the other. To someone else, the more "perfect" alignment of quantized beats and vox may sound better than the "sloppy" stuff I like.