Preference utilitarianism applied to someone who thinks that it is only through suffering that life can achieve meaning.

Yes, but now we're back to concrete feelings of actual people again. ;-)

To be clear, I don't subscribe to such a view myself, but it's conceivable. I agree with you that health is good for people. My point is just that this agreement owes more to shared intuition than conclusive empirical testing.

Right, which is one reason why, when we're talking about this particular tiny (but important) domain (that at least partially overlaps with Eliezer's notion of Fun Theory), conclusive empirical testing is a bit of a red herring, since the matter is subjective from the get-go. We can objectively predict certain classes of subjective events, but the subjectivity itself seems to be beyond that. At some point, you have to make an essentially arbitrary decision of what to value.