You're right, I could have done a better point of communicating your last paragraph. The point of this piece was to serve as a rebuttal to the handwavy notion

You're right, I could have done a better point of communicating your last paragraph. The point of this piece was to serve as a rebuttal to the handwavy notion that design is purely subjective. Of course design has subjective aspects—humans are subjective creatures, and we design for them. You're spot on with the statement that professionals have the approaches and tools for evaluating design choices. The little-league-ers, in my experience, rely on subjective statements ("It looks / it feels") more often than the ones who have depth. As a designer, my responsibility to my client is to be able to explain why my choice is in service of their business goals. More often than not, it sounds like a chain of justifications up the hierarchy of needs. Sometimes it's a conscious choice that is worse because something else has higher priority. It takes some practice to articulate, but there's rarely a choice that isn't related to your other choices, which are in turn related to your constraints. If you can't tie a choice to that chain, then it might just be that it doesn't matter, but more often than not it's a red flag that your choice isn't grounded in conscious thought about what makes your thing better.