Oh boy don't get me started on auto-tuned vocals. Personally I think this broke the last taboo if it comes to "ironing out" imperfections. Antares made it possible with their Autotune technology to rob the last bit of "soul" from the most human thing there is: their voice.
I also understand that the use of Autotune back then with "Believe" was purely to create something that is so drastically new sounding that it shocked the average people into liking it :D
So again, the use of quantization can be a creative element as well...

But back to MIDI. Personally I think its biggest flaw is that it is so old and no manufacturer dared to come up with something so good that it would replace this antiqued standard. It's too slow (31250 baud!) and prone to overflows. They could just build a new standard based on USB and you'll get less latency could better configure data streams and make it super flexible!