@Stockwaves, you’re right in every way, except that I was not talking about completely adapting tracks to crappy sounding gear. The most you can do is achieve a clean and “competition-free”* mid and low-mid range. If you can get that, you’re several steps closer to a good translating mix where you don’t give up sounding high-definition on a decent system; but the track still makes sense on laptop speakers or cheap output jacks of overpriced devices with fancy logos (and I don’t only mean the fruity gear here). 
There are two ways of fulfilling the mission of bringing quality music experience to people:
- Making them change the way they are thinking of audio gear and buy higher quality stuff
- Try to fit to what they use, in a way that you can still face yourself in the mirror.
*by “competition-free” I mean all instruments are working fine in peace next to each other, not competing for the same registers.