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If it was? It actually is. 50% white, 25% black and 25% Hispanic. We discussed this.

Yeah, I get that. The one thing that I will say is that when you hear a sound system from outside the car, you probably don't get any real sense of what sort of fidelity exists inside the car. The bass is the only thing that really travels outside the car.

But I think there are a lot of people who think that loud = good.

What pisses me off the most about this build is that I ended up originally getting the Rubicon with the "Premium" audio system. And each thing that Jeep added to the system just made the rebuild worse...

• It's customary to drive amplifiers with line-level outputs instead of amplified speaker outputs. But because they cheaped out and used the stock head unit, their system drives the amplifier with speaker-level outputs. This ends up amplifying noise.
• Replacing the head unit but not the amp ends up losing out on all fade control, because they control the fade in the amplifier using the CAN bus from the radio, not using the actual speaker outputs.
• It's normal when you have main speakers and tweeters (component speakers) to drive them together with one channel and then use a crossover between the two. Instead, they gave each tweeter its own channel. That's just one reason the stock amplifier is an 8-channel amp unnecessarily.
• They didn't even put highpass filters on the amplifier channels going to the tweeters, instead using an RC circuit at the tweeter itself with a RIDICULOUS filtering frequency. As such, the stock "Premium" system has tweeters in pillars on the dash that you can't even hear. One of the first things I did was change a capacitor on each tweeter to reduce the frequency at which the highpass allows signal. This in itself was a huge improvement and I could hear the tweeters after that.
• Everything in the amplifier is 2 ohm outputs, while the most common aftermarket speakers are 4 ohm speakers. And of course the stock speakers for the base system are 4 ohm, and the aftermarket speakers Mopar recommends are 4 ohm, without mentioning that the premium amp is 2 ohm.
• They allot another 2 channels for the subwoofer. Which is good, in the sense that they are at least doubling output to 90W instead of 45W. But that's still underpowered for a sub. But a better-designed amp that had a mono channel for the sub might have been a better idea.

All told, the design decisions made for the "Premium" system aren't very premium. And worse, the system was so intertwined as designed that the only way to make it right was to replace everything.

Is this a general thing?  Is it generally better when buying a new car to go with the standard sound system and upgrade with after-market equipment?

We used to have a "radio delete" option.  The upgraded sound systems are often very expensive pricewise.

Are you referring to the manufacturers' upgraded systems or after-market?

That was a huge thing in this build.

In a car without a top, I wanted to avoid anything that screamed "there's a good audio system here" to the world. In another car, I'd probably have gone for a head unit with a fancy touchscreen, but instead ended up choosing a head unit that had the audio specs I wanted but looks pretty low-end.

I selected an amp that had all the specs I wanted, but that I knew was small enough to be hidden in the dash. The Jeep already has no trunk space, so I didn't want to put it there, and I didn't want it to be even slightly conspicuous being mounted somewhere like under the seat.

I think aftermarket radios in general are a lot less common these days--because every car doesn't have a radio, it has an "infotainment system" now. I think for those vehicles, replacing things like speakers and amplifiers is easy, but many people don't want to get rid of all the rest of the integrated system.