[Dali]

I will say something that might not sit well with everybody.

Do you think that people obsess over lens signatures and bokeh mostly because their photography in general is lacking? Basically substituting technique or lens artifacts for content.

As soon as you detail a picture (sharpness, bokeh, ...), you miss the point. A picture is a whole. Of course people can use less than perfect equipment as it might ease what they try to convey but what matter is not the technical trick, it is the result: can you "see" beyond the picture or not?