Hello Rod. I agree, to each his own. But, ask yourself, when is the last time you have heard "object based" in the real world? For me, never. Everything I hear is in the horizontal plane. Even if an airplane or helicopter flies above, the sound is low frequency and omnipresent.
That sounds very odd to me. You should be able to localize when a sound is coming from above you or below you. That's the way our brain interprets the way sound waves change as they hit our auricle (the outside fleshy part of your ear) and then travel in, added to the time differential between your two ears. When you hear an airplane or helicopter fly above do you actually hear it as if it is flying past you down at ground level? Personally I hear all sound as "object based" in the real world.
Also, even with all your speakers in the horizontal plane, object-based sound encoding still applies. For example if you have your left main speaker at 30° off your directly-facing axis, and your left surround at 15° off your left-facing axis (i.e. to the left of your seat but also a little bit behind). But the sound engineer based the mix off the left surround being 0° off your left-facing axis (i.e. directly to the left of your seat). By remapping the sound to use both your left main and left surround speaker, with the appropriate changes in timing, the sound will properly localize to directly left of your seat. Without object-based encoding and remapping, the sound will instead come from only the left surround and be incorrectly positioned a little behind you.
Probably the most valid test of this is video gaming in a surround sound setup, with or without overhead/height speakers. Since the sound effects are artificially generated based on the exact position of other objects, players, and enemies in the game, proper localization allows you to immediately identify the location and react by accurately and precisely turning your "head" in the game to the place the sound was created. This is obviously a significant advantage in some games, so gamers will invest in good sound for this reason. If you haven't experienced this yourself, or you're not a gamer, you can still see this if you watch some YouTube or Twitch videos that show this happening. There was a recent brouhaha over one player who some people thought was cheating because he knew exactly where some other players were, but the final consensus was that he was just precisely locating them from the game sounds.
In some setups, Atmos may sound strange or a bit off-sounding. There are, for example, Atmos-enabled laptop speakers. It can make a big difference in the presentation (and I would argue accuracy) of the soundstage presented by the laptop speakers, but it can also sound very strange because it's not at all what one is expecting from laptop speakers. One of those things you'd need to get used to. Also, Atmos can sound strange if the processor doesn't have the correct knowledge of the speaker locations (assuming the room acoustics are not a significant issue, and the speakers are timbre-matched) because then the mapping can be incorrect. For processors that don't localize the speakers, you do need to approximate a speaker position standard which the processor then assumes you are using.
In my experience, Atmos does get you closer to the actual sound of reality, the same way surround speakers do over 2-channel. And should allow the sound engineers to worry less about what an end user's speaker setup and arrangement might be, and only worry about where sounds should be located. If you want to hear a guaranteed correct deployment of Atmos, a Dolby Atmos theater run by Dolby would do that. It could be there isn't one near to you or available to you though. Visiting an Atmos theater run by one of the cinema chains may be more of a hit-or-miss proposition.
