Within the scope of a game’s production, the programmer time spent dogfooding the new audio format can be used towards something else that improves the value of the end product.
The uncompressed audio for latency-sensitive one-shots usually isn’t taking up the bulk of memory either.
> programmer time spent dogfooding the new audio format can be used towards something else that improves the value of the end product
Like exploring the 'widely accepted industry practices' and writing code to duplicate the assets, then writing the code to actually measure what it did what the 'industry practices' advertised and then ripping this out, right?
And please note what you missed the 'if it really bothers you'.