An audio system can measure perfectly and still sound wrong. That gap is where the craft lives, and no spec sheet or measurement rig will ever close it for you.
Measurement is essential. A measurement platform like Smaart, SysTune, NTi XL3, or ARTA shows you exactly what the system and the room are doing: frequency response, phase, decay, arrival times. I would not commission a large system without one. But a measurement tells you what you have. It does not tell you how it sounds. Those are two different things.
Start with the target. The engineer has to understand the purpose of the room before touching a filter. A conference room, an auditorium, and a church do not need the same frequency response, and tuning them the same way is a mistake. A system set to a ruler-flat measured response almost always sounds too bright and harsh in a real room. Modern audiences expect more bass presence, and I have learned to tune a system to a downward sloping curve that brings the low end forward, because that is what the room and the audience actually want. The flat trace is correct on the screen and wrong in the seat. The curve that looks ideal is not the one that sounds ideal, and knowing the difference is judgment, not math.
A good engineer does not trust a single microphone position. They measure at several points and combine those captures, because no single spot represents the whole room. Even then, all system tuning is a compromise. The audience hears the system across hundreds of seats, and no single setting is best for all of them. You tune for the strongest result across the entire room, which means some seats could be made to sound better, but only by sacrificing others. The craft is choosing which compromises protect the experience best.
None of this is an argument against measurement. It is an argument against treating the measurement as the goal. The analyzer gives you one version of the truth. Listening gives you another. The best audio engineers I know respect both, then make the final decision with their ears.
Complex systems. Seamless experiences.