I just started to mess around with DSD and downloaded a couple digitized albums from RuTracker. Kill 'Em All and …Nothing Like The Sun. I have heard may versions of both but they have never sounded better. I was really surprised, it was very noticeable.
DSD it is actually the result of a primitive implementation of what is sigma-delta modulation (SDM), which is now the industry standard in A/D and D/A conversion. The reason it became a “high end” standard is commercial, not technical.
As a transport encoding, it makes little sense, as you can retain most of the advantages of SDM when encoding the result in PCM.
Merging Technologies, that pushes a lot on DSD, even had to invent a new brand for high-res PCM and call it DXD in order to justify that… PCM is a better format for production after all (their whitepaper on this is fun to read).
Of course it is perfectly possible that DSD releases are on average better recorded, as there is very little room for editing afterwards. I believe they would sound equally good if stored as PCM.
From what I’ve heard from some of the few who attempted it, all the related software for multitrack DSD is pretty unusable, so there are very few albums that have been DSD all the way from start to finish. Typically it is/was only used in the mastering stage for the DSD release - basically just PCM or analog mixes recaptured to DSD (after whatever analog processing is being used) for that format release.