Yeah. And you know, as a casual audiophile, that's my big frustration with this hobby. There's so much bullshit marketing (and audiophiles who believe it) that it really gives the whole hobby a bad name. (On the bright side, there are a lot of objective audiophiles and with just a little bit of knowledge you can get fantastic sound for very little money...)

    The label probably didn't give Green Day a huge amount of
    money for production when they made Dookie, for example,
    but it eventually sold 20 million copies and additional 
    production made sense.

I don't know about Dookie but their latter albums were recorded with full dynamic range and then squashed down into loudness-wars style mush.