When something jumps out at us—hearing a difference from another room or a slap in the face improvement—we tend to place far more importance on it then if we have to spend time digging through multiple examples to find the answer.
I imagine this to be true because an obvious improvement is bound to be bigger than one you have to work at hearing.
When I am lucky enough to get a shot at auditioning a new design I am always hopeful for that slap-in-the-face night-and-day improvement over the older design. Once in a while we score. More often than not, it takes a bit of digging to see where we improved and where we need work.
Like hitting the jackpot, the few times where you get a chance to audition something new and are dazzled by the improvement makes all the searching and hunting for buried treasure worthwhile.
Easy, obvious, immediate. Rare to have that experience, but when you do...(to make a pun) treasure it.
