A curious thing about modern lenses, as Geoffrey Crawley points out in the British Journal of Photography, is that the closer we get to eliminating all aberrations in our lenses, the further away we get from the lens that makes a pleasing picture, because "residual aberrations" help make a photograph more life-like. Image quality includes detail and gradation. And the "perfect" lens (without soft gradation) may ruin our picture.

The Amateur Photographer's Handbook (1973), p. 77 - Chapter 3: What the Lens Does