I tend to agree, but is that really a fatal flaw? A lossy compression scheme that gets it 90% right only has to encode the delta for the remaining 10%. Which is

I tend to agree, but is that really a fatal flaw? A lossy compression scheme that gets it 90% right only has to encode the delta for the remaining 10%. Which is a big cost, sure, but the alternative is evaluating how important the thrown-away stuff is, and that evaluation is rife with subjective value judgements. There are no right answers, only differing flavors of wrong ones. It's the question of what is important to generalize over, and nobody is ever going to agree on that.