THE kick!

[AstralNilaya]

Honestly, I think most criticism about modern kicks is really about everything else besides the kick, whether the critic recognizes it or not. The kick in a trance song is supposed to be easily ignored while you stand in awe of everything else---arps, acid lines, vocals if they're there, etc. "The kick is bad" really means "the rest of this song is too boring, so instead I'm paying attention to the loudest part." I would just assume most people put-off by modern kicks in an otherwise-good or -great song are nitpicking for the sake of nitpicking, because if you really are a kick connoisseur I'm not sure why you would get super upset about something happening in trance anyway. Something like minimal techno is where a bad kick is absolutely fatal.

If you're just annoyed that the kick is too loud, well...yeah. The loudness war was fought, and loud noises won. Everything in modern music is too loud, pretty much. That isn't changing. It's about as irreversible as the switch from mono to stereo.