So, what I'm hearing is that it is more prestige and appearance that performance?

Except for Mark's comment for distributed audio to locations without equipment. Which I understand and have and will implement but only for volume control. The dining room and deck are my targets.

I have a friend that built a full boat house - dual RG6, dual cat5, dual phone lines, audio and remote control in the majority of the rooms. All home runned to a distribution panel. It could feed a signal from the kids bedroom to the theater room. I thought that was cool but questioned the usefulness of it.