Two to four powered monitors aptly placed with specific volume settings for the best combination of stereo and detail and I'm done with speakers. A big spacious speaker set up doesn't appeal to me. Good monitors aren't always expensive...

I'll always have headphones though. I need something that can isolate me from my surroundings.

The two are... very different experiences, it's very similar to saying that you have an ipad (portable computer) and you don't need the Laptop/PC anymore because the ipad is doing everything better.

I find these extremists to be... completely destructive of everything they have seen and will encounter in their paths. 

I haven't bought any headphone gear for a while now and definitely not getting anymore speakers because of my plans to go living in Hong Kong again.

Yeah, 10dB is really nothing out of the ordinary for a regular room. You need serious work to damp the low frequency modes. Once you're in the midrange, the proportion of direct and reverberated field is going to also affect the perceived response, 5dB is absolutely in the realm of possibilities.

I'm also of the opinion it is stupid to claim either one is better than the other.  But at a given price point it does seem cheaper to get to the top with headphones. Trying to bring up the arguments of imaging / chest impact is silly, it's all a question of habits and what you are after.  In my case, I find most speaker rigs I get a chance to listen to (and it goes to the very high end in Tokyo) plain suck in comparison of what my headphone rig brings me (the speed, the articulation, the precise layering).

Headphone systems are getting more and more expensive by the year and loosing of their proposition value but still, you can't just ignore the fact it takes a whole lot of effort to optimize a speaker rig in a way it can sound as faithful as a good headphone rig does.

My speaker setup's fairly modest (Conductor's DAC -> Some Yamaha Receiver -> PSB Imagine Mini's + SudSeries 1), but I have to admit it has better timbre than most headphone setups I could throw together.  I generally find myself preferring the more immersive aspects of headphone listening, though.  And am often too self-conscious of people hearing what I'm listening to.

-Edit-

I also feel like I'd be compelled to just get ridiculously high end stuff if I ever really got into speakers and it would probably be a lot more expensive (including everything but the computer) than the $10,250 (I think?) headphone setup I'll be looking at soon.  Iuno, this hobby isn't a rational thing for me.