@neorasp
what humanity sought in agriculture is not taste but durability. and we did good in that, making vegetables sprout off season in aggrated speed and with bountiful harvest.
The most sought after thing in plant breeding, from the ancient world to today, has been the yield of a crop and the quality of that yield. Anything else is secondary. What good does it do to make an incredibly durable crop if it would take 4 times as much acreage to yield what an optimized yield breed would do? That's inefficient to the extreme and wasteful. So durability only comes after that. After that, yes, ability to grow in more strenuous climates and resistance to herbicides/pesticides and more natural resistance to things like blight/disease, viruses and fungi come about.
thoe traits did not come without a price, and that price was often the taste, which is kinda the least important trait when the population % that goes to farming is shrinking and shrinking. for example, did you know cucumbers used to have a smell? maybe in your country they still do. maybe it went away in exchange for shelf longavity.
...The smell of cucumbers (it's usually a melon/citrusy smell) is dictated by the variant of cucumber. Some do not have any smell that is detectable by human noses and any smell you could perceive would be an indication of something being wrong. Despite that, no, there is no price to taste. I've had watermelons that weigh over 40 pounds and tasted pumpkins that were so heavy that no one wanted to weigh them. Guess what? They tasted great and no worse than smaller specimens of the same type.
but you can't honestly believe food is richer in taste now that it used to be.
It is. Because we grew crops historically for that in mind. About 5,000 years ago, if you wanted a watermelon, you'd get something about the size of a strawberry that would taste bitter as hell. Watermelons today have about 4-6 times the sugar content as they did thousands of years ago. They taste better because we specifically grew and cultivated them to do just that. Oh, and guess what? During that time period... it also increased in size by multitudes WHILE improving flavor.
I don't know why you have such a negative view of selective breeding. My only guess is you're attributing GMO and other such genetically modified food complaints (of which many are also unfounded, by the way) to artificial breeding. Which... isn't the case. They are two entirely different methods for creating food. It's akin to looking at a stick of dynamite and a thermonuclear multi-megaton dial-a-yield nuclear warhead and saying that they're the same thing because they both explode. It... it doesn't work like that. We've been cultivating crops with selective breeding/artificial selection since around the time that the written word was a new invention for humans. The reason you enjoy things like heirloom tomatoes and think that they are superior... is because they were grown to be that delicious by human farmers over hundreds and hundreds of years. If you went back in time 3,000 years ago, the tomatoes you'd find in the wild would be pitiful and dreary things that even a genetically modified tomato grown by Monsanto would put to shame.
In fact, the reason why it's so difficult to do this reverse ancient agricultural historical reconstruction is because we've been growing and modifying these crops for hundreds or thousands of years and it's difficult to find out what the original completely untouched by human hands base crop species were like. Maize, for instance, also underwent a radical change from something the size of a peanut at best and was as difficult to open as a coconut to something that can be a food long and can be cooked right after pulling it off the stalks. How would anyone guess that human agriculture from thousands of years ago would change it that drastically without investigating the origins?