You're talking about artistic tradeoffs. That's fine.

I'm asking, how do you quantitatively measure in the first place so you can even define the tradeoffs quantitatively?

You say how in your opinion, different algorithms preserve detail better in different areas. My question is, how do we define that numerically so it's not a matter of opinion? If it depends on contrast levels, you can then test with images of different contrast levels.

It doesn't seem unreasonable that we should be able to define metrics for these things.