> I feel like this completely misses the mark. Audio quality was never the compelling feature of the iPod and people weren't clamoring for it because it sounded good.

Indeed. Apple made (and showed) the actual reasoning in the iPod introduction. All competitors had to was do the same: https://youtu.be/bz1ZWvZBGYM?is=NFlmkhq1gWfcNVgv

- 1000 songs

- play all popular formats: mp3, wav, aiff

- Firewire for fast transfers. Download 1000 songs at 30x speed than USB

- 10 hours continuous playback on single rechargeable battery

- the size of a card deck

Not like it was magical unknown hardware components at the time. And the competition still couldn't do it for almost a decade