Could be related to the kind of person who studies music academically, as opposed to understanding it intuitively (as I think Mozart did, based on the very catchy little songs he wrote pre-puberty). Writing something "catchy" is a non-trivial ability, is quite important to whether music is enjoyable (which is the criteria I think music should be judged on), and is hard to learn...and maybe can be learned, but not by studying theory, only by iteratively writing music and observing its emotional effect.

Well, modern music education (quite rightly) does require students to compose and play music and thus give them this kind of practice.

But the difference in understanding you're describing is exactly the kind of barrier reduction seeks to take down. A few hundred years ago, the mechanics who eked out the biggest performance for steam engines were the ones who had an "intuitive" understanding of what "just works right" and what doesn't.

Science sought to put this art on a more rigorous, learnable grounding, where you no longer need someone with "machine empathy", but can identify the governing rules behind nature and exploit them to get maximum performance -- and explain why a certain method gives better performance.

Reductionist and scientific progress occurs when we can take the black-box understanding that the earlier masters had and demystify it. Music theory should be doing the same thing: generate theories that take away much of the need for intuition in composition. And to its credit, it has done so: it identifies which chord progressions and which keys produce which kinds of emotional effects, which key changes generally "sound right", and which don't -- things like that.

But given the level of judgment MACs purport to be capable of passing on modern music -- and the musical "inferential distance" they claim lies between them and the masses -- they ought to have assimilated the kind of insight the previous masters had, such that it is trivial to write music of similar quality.

The problem, then, is that the true musical innovation just isn't coming from the ivory tower -- the very folks who should be the very be the very best at pleasing the mind of the unindoctrinated through music.

Hence my criticism.