Comment by contravariant

I don't think you're wrong but I think I failed to convey the point I wanted to make.

What I was getting at is that without an objective way of measuring the whole idea of super- or sub-linear becomes ill defined. You can kind of define something to be sub-linear by definition, so the argument becomes tautological or indeed circular.

So an article that talks about perceived quality without any discussion about how people perceive quality or importantly differences in quality can say pretty much anything and it will be true for some definition of quality. You can't just silently assume perceived quality to be something objective, if you give no arguments you should assume it to be subjective.