I"m not sure where the following fits in exactly, but I have a feeling it does. Somewhere.
Scottish philosopher David Hume talked about the "delicacy of taste." What he meant was that the more of, say, music one listens to, the better refined their taste will be.
Alright, let's use food as an example. If you've only eaten McDonald's your entire life and suddenly someone puts a great Indian dish in front of you, you'd be bewildered. You wouldn't be able to make sense of what your taste buds would be sending to your brain. On the other hand, an Indian cousine expert (someone who's eaten a lot of it) can better judge the same dish-- can detect the amount of curry, say, and determine if the cook has used too much or too little or just enough. The expert can pull apart the flavors and see how they combine to create the overall flavor.
This has been true of my own experience. Records or films or books I didn't like in my youth, I may return to and now "get." Why? Because inbetween I have absorbed 10,000 records, films and books.
Here's a problem: why does somelike, say, Cameron Crowe, who's listened to a ton of records, have such shitty taste? (He married someone from Heart for fuck's sake
) You can find any number of critics who, one would assume, have heard/seen/read a lot, and still have terrible terrible taste. So maybe Hume's wrong, or only right some of the time, or maybe some people are just freaks.