Wall Street Journal Causes Unnecessary Concern About MP3s

This WSJ article on MP3-quality sound really bugged me. The WSJ wants to give us something else to worry about in the music industry, but it's a completely unnecessary concern. The gist of the article is that artists, engineers and producers are recognizing that many or most people who listen to music listen to it as an MP3 file on an iPod. An MP3's quality is not as good as on a CD and the problem is exacerbated if the music is listened through standard iPod headphones.
If artists, engineers and producers engineer their musical finished product for the low MP3-quality standard, they deserve any backlash they get from consumers. Good engineers have the foresight to set the quality mark as high as possible and let the medium decide how to meet that standard. Joe Consumer has chosen the MP3 knowing that there is a slight loss in quality but a gain in convenience. I doubt the average listener's ears are so attuned that they will start complaining that their music is not engineered for MP3-level acoustics; so why not be prepared for the future and shoot for a better quality sound? The engineer's smart play is to be prepared for whatever medium replaces the MP3 down the road. When The Starting Line's 2002 Say It Like You Mean It album is heard in 2022 through whatever medium is popular at that time, the high-quality engineering that went into recording will be able to come through the high-quality medium. Good engineering will always outlast consumer trends. No worries.

Update: Apparently, this guy agrees (in a much more cogent and thorough way). AbsolutePunk picked up on the same story, but didn't comment.