That’s a fair point, but it gets to where a client sees your expertise, and I’d argue it’s not in aesthetics.
If a house painter tells me “that paint is shit, this is better,” I’m likely to trust them, but if they say “that color will look bad on your house,” we are now debating aesthetics. Maybe I like the color more than they do, maybe my family had a month’s long debate about the color, maybe I saw that they dress like a rockabilly and know that we aren’t going to agree on what looks good.
Maybe five years down the road, I have had this rockabilly repaint my house a dozen times (house painter metaphor sort of falls apart here, heaven help you if you repaint your house that much) and we know each other fairly well. Now we communicate better, trust one another. They know me and my tastes, I know them and theirs. When one of us makes a suggestion the other can counter it with understanding. Turns out they were right about the house color, and it only took them giving me my way eleven times to get there. I have remortgaged my house to pay for the repaintings. They tell me they’re going to retire early.
