I work with wires every day and first thing you learn is to not trust the guy before you even if it was you. The time it takes to learn this skill is inversely proportional to the voltages and/or price of equipment you have to deal with.
But jokes aside - my spider sense tells me we're not done here yet:
Yeah I mean have had a few sets of high-end open back headphones - adn stoundstange and imaging is talked about a lot - I can never hear as much amazing 'pinpoint of source' as many reviewers talk about.
Assuming you're an ordinary, healthy human with a head and two properly working ears - this shouldn't be the case.
Again, simplest solutions first - check your audio settings on a computer, assuming it's your source. Generally you want to disable all audio enhancements, 3D surrounds, spatial audio and all this crap on the drivers and system settings level. Also, your AV receiver has lots of correction features - I suggest factory reset or try to bypass it completely for a headphone test.
Personally, I can identify sounds hard-panned left or right coming directly out of the left or right speaker, especially high frequencies from the tweeter, but the center (and anything else) is rather vague. ...It sounds like I have a "wide" center speaker. I'm sure that's true for most people, otherwise surround sound wouldn't need a center channel/speaker.
Go to a store (preferably selling studio, prosumer and music gear) and try known and working monitoring equipment including some reputable headphones. If your hearing is okay, then it's time to troubleshoot your system.
I don't know if it's JBL's waveguide black magic, but
this works just perfect on the blue horizontal axis. Each tick has it's own distinctive place and I can point a finger at it.
Same with my HD-600 headphones, but the ruler goes through my head instead of being in front of me.
Precise imaging is definitely a thing, but I must admit I do smoke occasionally