To me, the foundation presented by good deep bass provides a sense of reality to the performance that just isn't there without it, no matter how good everything else is, even on recordings without a lot of deep bass.
Years ago I had some large Proacs in a medium-sized fairly square room. Even with 'bass busters' I could never tame the bass boom that overpowered the room and muffled and obscured the mids. I switched to Genesis V with dipole subs (eight 8") and couldn't get over the improvement from dipole bass -- much better. Then I tore out a wall for a better rectangle -- still better. I've used singles and pairs of (same) subs and without exception found the pair to be better -- just more natural.
Best bass I've heard in my room was from a pair of double-stacked Linkwitz Phoenix (four 12" Peerless per side in dipole configuration). But they're big with poor WAF and need to be way out into the room, so a pair of RBH 1010 in the corners have now displaced them. A pair of VBTs were quick and musical but didn't move quite enough air for my taste.
For the last four years I've been using a Tact 2.2x (modded) and for me, this does the trick better than anything else I've come across. For me, the trade-offs are more than made up for with clear, clean, deep and extended bass. Get rid of the room bass and the mids come alive. I've become very sensitive to boomy and muddy bass and I find that I can't get past that anymore in most people's rooms/systems that I listen to.
I've had friends say that the bass in my room is too lean, but I think that's because most people haven't heard clean, room-corrected bass and gotten used to it. But if I wasn't using Tact, I'd definitely consider dipole bass (subs).