There you go, bud. Agree with you. In fact, one approach is: what does it matter what a signal measures, as long as we like it. THat's the attitude of most SET owners, like you & me, and frankly, to me that makes sense as a music listener, though maybe not if i were an acoustical engineer, or trying to get the best measured performance. If Bob Carver reads this, maybe he can tell us what he did... he knows a helluva lot more about amp design & acoustics than almost all of us, including almost all folk in the business.
BTW, the SETs i own cost me a LOT less than what you are saying. THe zen amp is hand made for you by Steve deckert at $499 (it comes with a 30 day back guarantee: you MUST try it & steve offers GREAT customer service), the Asusa amp i got online for far less than that, and the 45 set (which has pretty high end parts: blackgate caps, good resistors, stancor power tranny, james output trannies, jupiter coupling caps) also cost me under $1500.
I like them all. They are cheap & LOADS of fun.
What kind of system do you have, Tom?
-akhilesh