Something germinated among your technical thoughts that suggested finding continued success in that direction.
Well one problem that all tube amps and nearly all solid state amps have is that they have pretty important limitations that prevent them from being able to use enough feedback. As a result of course they have less feedback than they should- and that feedback is causing problems!
We've all heard that problem too- the amp is harsher and brighter than real life- than the recording its supposed to reproduce. Of course there are a good number of manufacturers, us included, that avoided that problem by having no feedback at all. But that opens up the amp to tonal anomalies related to the speaker impedance.
In most amplifiers, the feedback is applied to a tube or transistor somewhere near the input of the amp. That tube or transistor isn't really linear, so the feedback signal is distorted before it can even do its job!
As a result IMD and higher ordered harmonics are generated and the ear perceives both as brightness and harshness. Class D allows you to overcome this problem, so the feedback isn't generating these distortions in the same way. In our case (I can't speak for other class D amps as there is quite a lot of variation in their designs!) the sources of distortion tend to cause lower ordered harmonics, much like in a tube amplifier, but at a much lower level.