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Vaniver comments on Being Wrong about Your Own Subjective Experience - Less Wrong
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True, but I mention them as a baseline against which to compare Modern Academic Composers, who have the advantage of dedicated learning and studying the history and theory of music. If they are genuinely learning the structure of reality in their studies (rather than, e.g., how to best pull off an "inside joke" among their fellow acoyltes), they ought to be capable of a lot more than just impressing classmates.
Thus, I claim that a fair standard to expect MACs to meet is that they could produce music of similar success to that of top classical composers, if given the audience -- but all they can produce is, in fact, stuff that only their classmates care about.
I would agree that their music is at least in the ballpark with Mozart -- no one has to be indoctrinated in years of schooling to like the Beatles (or Mozart) and yet they were able to gain the appreciation of huge sectors of society (also like Mozart).
But I think the appropriate question to ask is, why can't MACs do what the Beatles did? If they truly have assimilated the insights behind what made Mozart and the Beatles pleasing to the human mind, why can't they produce it just the same? I believe it's because they judge themselves only against the ivory tower, not reality -- and could not compete with "real world" music if they tried.
I agree with Paul Graham on this point, actually, which is that the first mover advantage is simply too strong to be overcome on any significant scale. Shakespeare is the playwright because he was massively prolific when plays were the hot new thing, and then inertia plus quality will propel him forward as the playwright until the end of humanity. There is some upper bound to the quality of plays, and Shakespeare is close enough that even though people who like plays will have contemporary favorites and those plays will be as good as or better than Shakespeare they will never significantly reduce his market share.
There's a similar experiment you can consider: start off with a bag containing one of each color of M&M. Remove one of the M&Ms chosen uniformly at random, and replace it and another M&M of the same color. What happens is that after 100 iterations, the bag will be almost all one color of M&M (this simulation is pretty easy to code; try it!). Even if you put in a new color of M&M that gets 2 new M&Ms of its color whenever it's picked, it won't dominate the old color since the old edge is too strong.
People may not be able to surpass Shakespeare, but that's no excuse for academics not outperforming other post-Shakespearean works on a regular basis.