Isn't "good taste" purely whatever that producer thinks works though
yes but some of them are wrong. I am just being extremely subjective!
By good taste, I don't mean "tasteful" like hotel lobby music or cream carpets.
I think by good taste you're really meaning "having a good enough ear to notice the connections between sounds, and then utilising them according to your particular aesthetic sensibilities to express yourself effectively" which will (or at least should) differ from the next person's.
That's kind what I meant. The first two paragraphs of your post were a bit obvious and made me feel you hadn't grasped what I was saying at all. Of course by good taste I don't mean everyone should sound exactly like Simply Red, everyone should make interesting and informed choices in their own way.
I just meant having an idea/vibe/aesthetic that you are aiming for can be enough to make a good record despite lack of technical ability. I was kind of cautioning myself that despite my earlier posts, although I believe it's worth learning technical stuff so that you don't have to spend ages worrying about the snare, it is still possible to make an awesome track without technical training or experience, as long as you are listening.
It just takes ages.
For example my friend Nick doesn't know the names of chords or notes on a keyboard but he can make up good chord progressions. It takes him ages but he knows when he finds a good one. It is a process of discovery. He knows when it sounds good because of his great taste. Same with synth sounds or lines in a poem: I could say "you are the sunshine of my life" or I could say "shall I compare thee to a summer's day". Anyone could express that but it takes a certain good taste to choose the right line for the context.
I see creativity as a series of choices and the people who make interesting choices make the interesting artistic stuff, and they are the ones I would describe as having good taste.
In my subjective world there is also BAD taste which consists of things like using trance sounds, rhyming "moon" with "june", making the hihats really trebly and the vocals really dull. The first and second are boring lazy cliches, the third are just unsatisfying to hear - there's definitely a way to do it that almost any listener would perceive as sounding better even if they didn't know why.
But of course there's a slippery slope in this direction towards narrow-mindedness and proscription (once I played someone a song and they said "the second chord is wrong, should be this chord if you're in that key" and I was dumbfounded, "no i wrote it like that. how can you say music is WRONG?)
Nick can write good chords without knowing theory and teachers who tell you there is a right and wrong in aesthetics are best avoided, but if you want to be a poet, when inspiration strikes, you want to be able to get a pencil sharpened in under an hour so.