I think you're interpreting 'good taste' too narrowly. A sense of the value of things is what motivates people to want to produce them. So if you value nice things enough to want to make more of them, that's 'good taste'. He's not saying taste is an immutable attribute that cannot be refined.

He's not writing an essay on the relationship between taste, skill and creativity and how they feed back into each other. I think he's just saying stick in there. It's tough for everyone in the beginning, and this is one reason why.

Talent is a real thing, it isn't magic. Each of us has a unique brain with unique programming/experience and some of us are more or less capable at various tasks. When I type stuff like this out I start to wonder why this has to be explained.

I agree. It seems that his overall position could be stronger if he just started with the requisite of having some taste. Which everybody has.

It'd still all ring true, and be more general, in the sense that one's taste is linked to who one is (your unique background and life experience). So in general this condition of relative uniqueness, saying nothing of it's subjective quality or goodness, could still be enough to make one's creative efforts worth something, inasmuch they'll probably be relatively unique.

Entirely agree. In art school our instructors often spoke of developing your eye. By seeing many things, thinking about them in depth and doing exercises you develop the skills needed to appreciate, differently the things you see. It was never about fostering some innate "taste" or aesthetic you had to get out. Talent surely does exist but you have no idea about it as a beginner. Talent functions on a level far beyond what most people think, before that comes passion, much time invested and the fruits of this are what most people mistake as talent.

He doesn't say anyone "magically started out" with good taste. He's saying he had it when he started trying to get good at making his own stuff. At that point, he - presumably - had a lot of experience consuming media, and he had plenty of time to develop his understanding of what he thought was "good" and "not good". It's true that that understanding doesn't necessarily match society at large, although in the case of Ira his success indicates that it matched well enough with enough people.

Something that's not mentioned in the quote but that I think is really important is the fact that the media he was consuming in training his "ear" was - in our culture of mass-media - predominately produced by some of the very best of the very best (by some metric). Of course your early efforts are going to pale by comparison.