The Death of Imagination

This is a very linguistic interpretation of the whole thing -- perhaps a bit overly linguistic. My first conversation teacher (a native speaker from Hangzhou) used to say hen3 mei3 was better than mei3 because the Chinese simply don't like the sound of one-syllable adjectives. Mei3, being a one-syllable adjective, didn't sound pleasing to the ear, so they turned it into hen3 mei3, which as a de-facto two-syllable adjective sounded better to them. Authentic two-syllable adjectives such as, say, piaoliang (pretty) are fine on their own, although in practice, you'll frequently hear hen3 piao4liang, hao2 piao4liang, zhen1 piao4liang or man3 piao4liang.