I'll have to respectfully disagree on this. More power to Matt and his prolific career, but man, can we please have some other voices.

Edit: My goal is to be immersed in the story, and having a small group of VAs work on everything becomes distracting, in my experience.

Even with bad actors, you can still usually appreciate the stories.

True, but not what the conversation was about.

For most of human history, plays were performed by hundreds, maybe thousands of different actors across centuries. How many different men have played Romeo or Hamlet?

I would have absolutely no problem with replacing James Earl Jones with another actor in a remake.

Characters get re-cast quite often as their actors age out or die

All three of these situations are different than dubs. In the first two cases you have people using an existing work to realize a unique artistic vision, combining what was already there with their own perspective and self expression. A remake (and another instance of a play performance) doesn't replace the original, as its an entirely separate work. In the last case you have the original creators of something working around a fact of life, and still doing their best to realize their own vision.

In the case of a dub you have a localization company contracted by a publishing company to produce a product. Their objective isn't to create a new work of art, which is why its very rare for someone to say "you should watch the original first then the dub for the best experience", like they do for, say, Suspiria (1977) and Suspiria (2018).

The desired outcome of a dub is to provide as close to the same experience as possible to the original, but in a different language. So essentially the producers of the dub are trying to do the same job as the original director. The thing is that almost everything about the quality of a movie performance is attributed to the dynamic between director and actor. People literally write books about how a specific performance came to be, specific things that a director said to an actor, specific events that happened to take place on set. If I said "give me access to the same actors and cameras and hand me a script and I could do as good of a job as Steven Spielberg" people would think I was insane.

So why is it SUCH a controversial statement to say that maybe Bobson Dugnut at a random localization company may have done a worse job than someone like Yoko Taro or Hayao Miyazaki?

if you’re saying stuff like this

I'm not. My statement was (quite obviously, I think) an illustration of the bizarre logic of interpreting "A is better than B" as "people who have difficulties with A should be gatekept from the subject altogether and not use B either".

Reading literally engages different parts of your brain that are otherwise dormant.

That's still not "a lot more cognitive effort" that you claimed, though, and also not proof that it reduces your appreciation of the animation.

And as I mentioned, sometimes I want to watch stuff while high.

Who cares? That's such a specific use case, nobody is arguing for or against dubbing with regards to how much you can follow it while high.

Sometimes I want to give my eyes a break from using my glasses or reading things in fine detail.

but it is also very common for myself and a lot of other people to be doing other things and having TV on in the background

Writing this after previously arguing dubbing is better because it allows you to follow the animation more attentively is just ridiculous.

This whole discussion is ridiculous, in fact.