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.