They have a rabid fan base that would gobble up anything and everything that they make

Discrete R2R ladders are "en vogue"

Randos with really bad gear or limited experience, making pronouncements of awesomeness

FPGAs are also en vogue.

Making an R2R ladder for a 16 bit audio DAC using 0.1% parts is nuts. Take for example the Soekris which uses the 0.05% parts at the low end and the 0.01% parts at the high end. Or the TOTAL DAC guy who uses up to 12 of these ladders (using 0.01% parts) to average out the errors in order to get better INL.Now, the the screwy INL can be corrected with calibration, but I seriously doubt this is done by AGD.