I'd not heard of refinement culture until now. I Googled it and it appears to be to do with how sports strategies and advertisements are finely tuned to squeeze

I'd not heard of refinement culture until now. I Googled it and it appears to be to do with how sports strategies and advertisements are finely tuned to squeeze out the maximum probability of success. Which sounds like "heavily optimizing for a certain metric" is a better description than "high quality", and applies also to pop music.