Donny...you know a lot. Your absolutely right about the pleasing sound of stereo. Unfortunately, most live performances are subjected to harmonic idiosyncrasies of the room their performing in.

When I had the big studio in Wisconsin...the control room was tuned to accurately reproduce a stereo field only at ear level of the engineer. We always would check a mix in mono making sure there was minimal phase cancellation. If you could get the mix sounding good in mono...and then pop it into stereo...it would sound so much better.