Well, of course as everyone knows, Nakamichi manufactured cassette decks, including arguably some of the best ever made by anyone--and some other companies' decks were made for them by Nakamichi. But I take your point regarding "their" microphones (and also the Nakamichi-branded version of the Sony PCM-F1 digital recording adapter, which differed only in four capacitors from Sony's; such a silly business).
Also I agree with you that a "shootout" can be useful if you _don't_ compare anything while listening, but simply take it as a chance to hear several particular types of microphone in use. That hadn't occurred to me before, so thanks.
To most people, though, I think that the opportunity for critical comparison is pretty much the whole point. And because of that flawed concept, the microphones (or microphone pairs) aren't normally placed where they would each sound the best, nor are they chosen for the room and the type of source material as one would normally do. Rather, they're placed as nearly identically to one another as possible, and they're chosen for the sake of comparing them, whether they're the type you would normally choose for that type of recording or not.
As a result, the placement (along with the source material and the recording space) usually favors the characteristics of one microphone type over the other(s). Or sometimes it puts all the microphones at a disadvantage more or less equally--but in no case do you get to hear what you could ideally get from each type of microphone. So as long as people still call them "shootouts" and regard them as such, I still say that they're crap.
Finally, I'll just say that back in the 1970s, I used to lend my recording equipment to other people fairly often, on the condition that they would let me hear the results they got. In no case did anyone EVER make a recording that sounded like my recordings.
I want to come clean and admit that fairly often, the other people's recordings sounded better to me. But even when the shoe was on the other foot, and I was the one trying to get the same sound that someone else was getting, even when I used the exact same equipment as they did, my recordings still sounded like my recordings--not like theirs. I might call that Satz's second law of sound recording.
--best regards