What you're saying is true, but consider this also: America's Test Kitchen made identical versions of a bunch of recipes with identical ingredients on identical equipment simultaneously, and with no exceptions, the tasting panel preferred the ones containing bay leaves, but interestingly, they couldn't state exactly why.
This here is more interesting than everything else in the thread. IIRC ATK is a TV show so I presume the experiment wasnt particularly rigorous, but it's still neat to learn.
