Ah!
Rookie mistake to send pre production protos for review indeed - especially if they didn't check them and measure them at the factory first
Honestly I've been there done that with in room plots at the listening position and at 1m etc. I was doing to almost two decades ago. Audio, for me, is an illusion. If that illusion sounds authentic to your own ears then it's fine IMHO. It's just not something I worry about now Keith and I no longer have all of the equipment. I know how the room measures and know the bass roll off of the speaker I use is ideally suited to it.
In that respect I'm in the same camp as many well respected designers. You need the frequency response to be
reasonably accurate but fiddling with electronics to get them "perfect" is, IME, a waste of energy.
I've also found that, in my systems, electronic active crossovers are superb when it comes to clarity and detail, but all of the implementations I've tried were lacking to a degree in "musicality" or as I prefer to call it authenticity or coherence.
To me music is a fantastically dynamic medium and it's dynamics (and the lack of dynamic compression) that really makes or breaks a system and adds that level of authenticity that is lacking in many systems that focus on other metrics.