Yeah, I look at selling FLACs as simply functional compressed and pure digital replacement of CDs (which are raw lossless audio). I can encode from CD to any codec I wish with transparency, same with FLAC. And encoding from MP3 as was already mentioned above isn't equivalent. So the fact that they sound the same is only part of the picture. I agree that only a minority would deal with reencoding anyway, but I look at this from the point of view of not reducing functionality.
Those new pseudo formats are a fake (according to this article:
https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html ). I'm not an expert in it really, but I trust Monty knows what he is saying.