I am a jazz guitarist and am sympathetic to this comment: the way I tune my guitar these days is hitting an E tuning fork, playing a particular E7 chord, and deciding if it sounds good:

  e —0–
  B —0–
  G —7–
  D —6–
  A —7–
  E —0–
Learned it from Jimmy Bruno. I despise digital tuners. However it is worth noting: a properly-tuned guitar will never be able to play a “barbershop seventh,” which hits the natural harmonic dominant 7th and is so flat compared to TET that it’s really almost a 6th. The chord itself sounds more bittersweet and less “funky” than a TET dominant 7th. OTOH the TET chord is an essential part of modern blues-influenced music: being “out of tune” makes the chord sharp and strong, almost like a blue cheese being “moldy.” So I’m not beaten up about the limitations, it’s just worth keeping in mind: no instrument can beat a group of human voices.

In general your ears do not hear these little arithmetical games around mismatched harmonies. They hear things like “this chord sounds warm and a little sad, this one is bright and fun.”

There's more than one way to be sympathetic :)

With 12 of the strings on a sitar having equal (thin) diameter, but different lengths so they can be tuned to the 12 notes in the scale, these are also unplayed strings which contribute to the sound by resonating underneath the main course of strings which are the ones fretted and manually played on.

That's so endearing I guess that's why they call them sympathetic strings ;)

While my guitar gently weeps, etc. . .