Agreed. I saw a show a few months back where the "engineer" was leaning back drinking a beer nodding his head like "all good" but the sound was atrocious. Kick drum was non existent and vocals were buried. You have to really understand and be able to diagnose low freq's to get good live sound. Ar bar level, many sound guys are the buddy that tags along and might as well be doing something worthwhile. Most aren't properly trained and the ones that are are working for a living and I can't afford.
We played a gig last month for the bass player's birthday. We used my PA and lighting. One of things about the guys in the band is that they are super easy to please pros. Set the monitors and forget.
The second band were great, a folky, party band with bass, banjo, washboard, drummer that just had a snare and a guitar.
They were nice guys and knew beforehand that they were using my PA and that I'm not a professional sound engineer. Still, it was never good enough for them. They bemoaned the lack of DI box for their piezo outputs, wanted constant adjustments to the monitors and stressed about the FOH mix. Every time I stepped on stage, I noted that the monitor mixes were rather good. You could hear everything clearly, except the guitarists hollowbody piezo guitar that submitted to feedback at the slightest provocation. Further, I rarely got asked straight forward requests instead I got 'Can you fix my mic, it's loud enough but I'm really having to lean into it'. I queried if they wanted me to reduce the compression but they didn't understand the concept and so I never got to the bottom of the problem. They also complained about the mic I put on the snare being not high quality enough.
All this whilst tiny children danced with elderly grannies, none of whom would notice if I turned the snare completely off, let alone used a better mic.
They were paid and chose not to bring their own mics, DI boxes, preamps or monitoring solutions. The crowd loved them, they knew I was also there to enjoy the party and still they grumbled about things.
Sadly, this experience is really common for me. I've been the emergency sound guy when no one else was around and had drummers demanding all sorts of EQing on their snare, more snare in the monitors, singers complaining about absolutely everything and so on.
On the other hand, ive had immensely brilliant musicians make the smallest request and then say 'Good enough for me, cheers'.
My personal rig is designed to take the soundman out of my monitoring so no matter what the PA setup, i tell the sound guy that I'm taking a split from the mic and that I need nothing else. The monitor can be turned off if they want.
Aiming this at those ive personal experience with and not you, the entitlement of musicians never fails to annoy me. If your instrument needs a preamp or DI, bring one. If your monitoring needs are challenging, build a suitable rig to accommodate or bring your own monitor engineer.
So whilst i agree there are some terrible sound engineers out there, there are more prima donna musicians that don't take responsibility for their experience.