The music industry and the academia has something in common: composers/academics are basically, content creators. Looking into a bit music history helps understand the general dynamic of both worlds.
From the book The Orchestra And Orchestral Music (W. J. Henderson, 1899):
The older composers are like ancient history; one must have sufficient information to know what to accept and what to reject in order to read them with advantage.
(From chapter The Strings, where the author is trying to make a point on which composer to look to to study the best string orchestration)
I think there is something profound in how the author view (and try to let the readers understand his way of viewing) the development of woodwinds and harmonies through time:
[The woodwind’s] importance in the modern orchestra cannot be overestimated. Half the tone coloring of our symphonic works and operatic scores depends upon skilful combinations of the tone-tints of wooden instruments…
However, in the early days, before a system of enriched instrumentation has been developed, it was the custom to treat the woodtinds part without any design that affected the the display of their coloring qualities…
J.S. Bach for instance, regarded his instruments merely as so many voices, and he treat them as such… Furthermore, he was not sufficiently imbued with a feeling for the harmonic style—the style in which a leading melody is supported by a subsidiary accompaniment, as in our songs. This is the style on which our symphony rests, but it was foreign to Bach’s genius.
As a flute player, Bach’s work is no ‘fun’ to play, cause they seldom (perhaps never) have flute passages that are dreamy/surreal where we love to show off our timbre and musicality during orchestra solos. The boredom lasts longer before people find out how to write woodwinds well—ealier classical composers like Haydn, Brahms and Beethoven’s symphonies wasn’t that much fun for woodwind players in general. And it wasn’t as least til Mozart did our parts get more interesting.
Similar for brass, and even strings. It takes a bit of time for generations of composers to build on the modern glory (plus, the musical instruments’ sound and techniques also improve). So, with these historical perspective, we usually do not disregard those earlier works that they’re in lack of super rich chords, or missing a splendid flute solo:
One will not expect of Haydn or Mozart such richness and complexity of scoring as he will demand and find in the work of contemporaneous [1900±] composers.
Plus, we have AI nowadays.