The demo tape that made me rethink my whole mixing setup, in a bad way

I spent last weekend digging through a box of old tapes from my band's 2004 sessions, and I found a rough mix we did at a friend's place in Akron. Everyone in the community always says lo-fi is charming and that the raw sound is what makes basement demos special, but I honestly think our stuff sounded better when we overthought it. The tape had this wobbly bass and the vocals sat so far back you'd think we were hiding them, and I realized we spent 6 months chasing that "authentic" sound when the version we did with cheap plugins and extra takes was way tighter. I found the actual studio notes in the box, and the engineer literally wrote "turn everything down 3dB" on every song, which made me laugh because we ignored that advice completely. It surprised me how many people in these forums romanticize mistakes that were just us being lazy or broke, not artistic choices. Has anyone else listened back to their old stuff and realized the "raw" takes were actually just lack of experience, not genius? I'm curious if I'm the only one who thinks polished beats rough in most cases.

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