Finalist: Post with the largest number of legitimate uses for the letter "x"
In the perfect world if all audio mixes sounded good from the get go, we wouldn't need any tools in mastering or even the profession at all.
Well, perhaps with the meSpace-era corrupted definition of mastering as "making a single song sound good", that may have some fraction of truth, but in the real world definition of mastering as "prepping recordings for their final sound and destination media", there is always going to be a need for mastering.
The point is, we don't need a perfect world. It wasn't that long ago that all audio mixes DID sound good - or at least were supposed to (the human element always makes sure that there are going to be clunkers here and there, of course.) That was the WHOLE IDEA of mixing, to create the best-sounding mix that you could. Mastering was NEVER about making bad mixes sound good, it was about polishing and prepping perfectly GOOD mixes. This leads into your next question:
I'm tying to see where the real disdain for the use of MB comes from?
It seems on the internets there is a real dislike for these but I have yet to hear a real reason why?
It's not (IMHO) so much a a disdain for the tool, it's a disdain for it's misuse and abuse based upon a misunderstanding of the recording production process in general.
Back in the 70s, the subject of similar debate was the whole "fix in the mix" syndrome. People started to be lured by the siren calls of more sophisticated EQ, compression and multitrack technology into the lazy tactic of not worrying about problems with the tracking because they could just "fix in the mix". As you should well know, relying too heavily on that philosophy is a recipe for disaster. Now with stuff like MBCs, harmonic balancers, and other such fancy doodads, that has been pushed even a step further down the chain. Nowdays, on boards like these (and it's not limited to HR), newbs are being drawn to the idea of "fix in the master".
After the four+ years I have been frequenting this board, I can testify without hesitation that a good 90% of newb home recorders - and many non-newbs, FTM - know almost nothing about what the stage of mixing actually entails, and worse, don't even know that they do not know. There is this pervasive belief that mixing is pretty much a mechanical process of roughly slapping the tracks together, and fixing and modifying the sonic problems with the resulting mix is SUPPOSED TO be handled in the mastering stage, by the use of things like MBCs and Hair-Ball and such.
This backloading of the process from tracking to mixing, and then from mixing to mastering, as if music production is just a more complicated version of using their 5-band EQ on a stereo track on their home stereo or mePod is the problem.
Now, some of you mastering dudes may not see it that way, as it can mean a potential for even more business in an expanded role for you guys. But it doesn't serve the music, the process or the client well to embrace the idea. Besides, if the trend continues, it will wind up biting you guys in the ass when things move to "fix it in the shrink wrap", which is the logical next step.
If you really want to mix, do it in the mix. Don't save it until after the mix has been mixed.
G.