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It is interesting how music recording/playback has shifted over the years.
Vinyl was good quality, but not very convenient or portable (albums were large, weren't very resilient to the elements, and deteriorated by just being played).
Cassettes swapped portability (convenience) for some quality. Although they lost out in convenience by being sequential access (having to fast forward/rewind between tracks).
Then CD's came out and they were hailed as being great for their improved sound quality (although many prefer the warmer and more "analogue" sounds of vinyl), improved durability, they didn't deteriorate no matter how often you played them, and were more portable than vinyl.
So there was a to-and-fro battle with tradeoffs between portability/durability/quality, without any subsequent format wanting to forgo too much of one for any other.
But mp3 has almost completely touted convenience above quality. The first wave of mp3 players used flash for very small capacity players and hard drives for larger capacity, but hard drive players have diminished in importance and again there has been a push for the convenience of flash-based players over larger capacity hard drive players.
Of course, eventually flash memory will be cheap enough to make it viable to use lossless compression for large media libraries, but that is not yet the case. And when this happens, quality will still be an afterthought, as improvement in quality is a byproduct of the technology and not its inherent thrust.
I find these changing priorities interesting.
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