[Andrex]

I guess it's hard to stop my originalist tendencies from boiling over into other topics...

What you're saying to me is like someone saying, well, if the piano had more octaves then existing compositions would have been better. But those pieces were composed with the current amount of octaves in mind in the first place...

Maybe there's an analogue with the harpsichord-to-piano transition, but I'm not knowledgeable enough about that yet.

[ralferoo]

Haha, my first gut reaction to reading your second paragraph was "No, it'd be better to compare it to compositions written for harpsichord and played on piano".

I guess history has shown that most composers (and listeners) preferred the piano sound over the harpsichord sound the majority of the time.