The reason this "audiophool" uses FLAC is because I want my music collection to be stored at the same quality it was when I paid for it; and FLAC is more conservative with storage than PCM.

I don't stream it; and I don't use it on a phone. If I ever need to do those things, I can convert from FLAC to lossy, knowing that I'm starting with something that is as accurate I can get.

That is, I'm implicitly using FLAC as an archive format. Gzipped PCM would work, except that I can't play that directly in a music player. I don't care about a bit-flip rendering a FLAC unplayable; my collection is backed-up.

Basically, I'm not going to pay for a CD full of bits, and then immediately throw away a lot of those bits.

This. It's just silly to throw data away. Who knows when you might need to transcode?

LOL I didn't write that part since HN has a long and what I think is pointless argument last time we discussed bluetooth and audio.

Going from lossless to lossy is better than lossy to lossy.