This is the reasoning I don't get. Keeping it simple, if 24/96, is THE original MQA CAN'T make it better, it is at most a clever/better lossy compressed format. When streaming and storing uncompressed 24/96 is painless MQA has no purpose at all.
It's not a reasoning, it's a statement of my real life experience lol The point is that MQA was used to bring 96/24 to TIDAL, a platform I discovered and liked after buying my first DAC. I have tried Qobuz which has straight PCM which can also be downloaded for offline listening, up to 192/24 which I like, but I found the desktop app to be very buggy, slow, and confusing to use, so I didn't use it after the trial period.
In my mind, the MQA is better quality because of the authentication aspect, where I know there has been a process to check the quality and ensure that the version of the album being played has been verified as being true to the original master. The unfold concept is a bit of a downside as I would prefer to have a direct data stream to the DAC, but I'm very happy with the audio quality on the 'MASTER' albums, so I don't have any practical issues with it.
I can tell you that nothing I've read in this thread would make me change my mind on using MQA for now. I think the value proposition is too good, and I welcome anything that takes music and audio past the Mp3 compressed / lossy hell of the 2000's. So between the High Res concept, and MQA I think they are steps in the right direction to expand high quality audio into the mass market and make it more available which I like.