LME vs DME and LME vs LME

Andrew's John Lennon Belgian recipe got me thinking about LME quality, and whether liquid extracts should be converted over to dry extracts, just in general.  Obviously, the advantages of All Grain brewing are that you have total control over how the ingredients are prepared, and know what is going in your beer.

The differences between the extracts, however, should also be noted.  A quick search around on the intertubes turned up a preference for dry, versus liquid...now, how much of this preference is due to quality, and how much is due to perceived quality?  I have no idea.  I do recall in Papazian's Bible a blurb about some LME's being better than others...I'd imagine that if it comes in a can, it might not be as good.  We're not talking about a can of beans you take to the mountains to eat in the wild, but instead the main fermentable in a batch of heaven juice (aka, homebrew).

Back to DME vs LME, if dry is generally better quality, then perhaps we should stick there, and cut out the liquid entirely?  There are some recipe adjustments that would have to be made (not sure if Beersmith does this, but I'm betting it probably would, since it seems to weight the sugar by composition, rather than raw weight).  I found this handy conversion formula to go from All Grain -> Liquid -> Dry:

1 lb Grain = 0.75 lb LME = 0.60 lb DME

Now, if you weren't going from straight grain, the conversion from LME to DME would be 1 lb LME = 0.80 lb of DME.

So the dry is the most concentrated of the three (which makes sense, since it has had all the liquid removed).

Something to ponder on.