You sir have either been fed a very large spoonful of T!H$ and immediately thereafter hypnotized to believe it was candy you were to slosh around and relish until you licked your teeth clean......OR you sat in a few "SQ cars" that happened to have 3way front setups and also happened to score high on the completely subjective tests administered by few that would be "qualified" by true audiophile standards.
Since you love to argue, please share with us your empirical data that undeniably proves that a 3way front stage in a car or home or studio is the only way to reach "high end" status.
I wouldn't say you must have a 3-way front stage to reach high end status, but I would say its a tried, tested and proven method, when implemented correctly, to achieve a high quality front sound stage.
The reasoning:
First, frequency response versus path length differences. Ideally, all path lengths from your speakers to your ears are equal. This never happens however (in a car), so we compromise. Car audio mids are designed to run infinite baffle (because most are mounted in doors, which are IB). If you place them in small sealed enclosures in the kick panels, low frequency response will be negatively affected (less midbass). But if you place your 2-way mids in the doors for better low-end response, the path length differences are much greater. This can be accounted for with time alignment, but that can cause its own problems (like relative phase differences). Another possible solution is to run your 2-ways in the kicks, but vent/port them to boost low frequency response, or build an aperiodic membrane enclosure for them venting out through the sheetmetal behind the kicks. Unfortunately, both these methods are a bit too complicated for the average enthusiast to do, and do right. This does not mean all 2-ways sound bad, it simply means they generally require more work to sound as good as a well implemented 3-way.
The 'sweet spot' in human hearing, where it is most sensitive, is in the midrange. So the logical conclusion is run a 3-way, with mids playing midrange, in your kicks, and dedicated midbass drivers in your doors. Midbass is much harder to perceive point sourcing than is midrange, so the path length differences of your midbass drivers in the doors is not nearly as critical as with the midrange.
Secondly, talk to just about any well versed SQ guy and he'll attest to the fact that midbass generally sounds better when the passenger side midbass driver is wired out of phase with the rest of the system. With a 3-way setup, the midbass and midrange are separate drivers, do you can control the phase of your midbass independent to the midrange (because midrange should not be wired out of phase). Ive known some SQ competitors that have run 3-ways for no other reason that to give them control over phase of the midbass without affecting phase of the midrange.
But to answer the seeming contradictory nature of saying less speakers is better, but a 3-way is usually better than a 2-way is... yes, ideally we would only need 2 speakers, run full-range, that adequately produce 20ha-20khz, both sat in front of you, equal distance from the listener. But human technology will not allow such a speaker to exist, and car interiors wont allow you to place them where they'd need to be for ideal performance.
Hope that clears up this debate, and gets the thread back on topic. No need to angry at each other guys, we all have the same love for the same hobby here. Be patient with each other, its not always easy to properly express respect or meaning via text on a computer.