I don’t dispute that. What I’m saying is that functional and even non-functional taste in software tends to be grounded in how it can more effectively serve our needs. In a way that’s actually a more profound kind of creativity and taste than something that tries to just look cool.
OTOH music and anything else snob-adjacent aren’t grounded in serving our direct needs to some other end the same way software tends to be, so to them “taste” could be reducible to just a favorite flavor or becomes a kind of status/value/oneupmanship. The products are consumed directly as ends unto themselves so people who have strong opinions on their comparative tastefulness care about that for different reasons than they do software.
OTOH music and anything else snob-adjacent aren’t grounded in serving our direct needs to some other end the same way software tends to be, so to them “taste” could be reducible to just a favorite flavor or becomes a kind of status/value/oneupmanship. The products are consumed directly as ends unto themselves so people who have strong opinions on their comparative tastefulness care about that for different reasons than they do software.