You newborz are forgetting there are THREE types of car audio. Bassheads, Audiophiles, and TWEAKS. The new generation seems to have not heard the tweaks because they are trying to use two types of car audio instead of three. Tweaks are people who can't or don't want to sink the money into being an audiophile, but still want to buy upper end stuff and tweak the hell out of it until it sounds as good as possible. They care about staging, they care about quality, they may be bassheads on friday and listen for the SQ on monday. Their systems are not anywhere near as expensive as an audiophile system.
As long as they squeeze the best they can afford into the car and spend countless hours making it sound as good as possible as an ENTIRE SYSTEM, not just subs or just high end mids and tweets, but the ENTIRE SYSTEM tweaked all to hell, then they are the missing link between the Audiophile SQ systems and the Bassheads.
If you are a Car Audio newb, grab some old CA&E mags from the 90's and read about the tweaks when they were at their strongest when people had good music to listen to and wanted to hear it, before the bassheads took over. The demise of the tweaks as the largest group began when IASCA introduced the DB Drags in the late 90's.
Frankly I believe if there were any good music being made, people would be more inclined to listen to it. Blame the recording industry.