Lossless (when used properly and able to algorithmically guarantee what comes out == what goes into the compression toolchain) avoids the whole issue altogether, and that's what's valuable about it.
Focusing on whether compression captures every nuance of uncompressed sound is the wrong battle. The real battle is against careless distributors and bad artifacts introduced by poor compression settings and often incorrectly coded compression utilities used throughout the music industry.
(ie we on hn might all be using Lame or the Fraunhofer mp3 encoders, but a lot of music producers/distributors will be using custom / closed source encoders, or even audio workstations with the encoder implemented in hardware, and those might or might not be encoding mp3 correctly.)
Whether it's because of the math or because of poorly done encoding is only of academic interest. It happens regardless of the cause. Using a lossless encoding resolves the issue entirely.
Double-blind tests have made this abundantly clear.
If you really can hear a difference, you've either got particularly poorly compressed files, or are in a tiny minority of us.