It may be down to the quality of the original pattern. I mean, if you were a talented chef, and someone asked you to cook a bunch of meals so they could copy them and ship them out to every single home... would you do it? Either no, because you've given away what made your meals special (in which case they had to get a less caring and probably less-talented chef) or you would but deliberately used too much salt (or too little). So either way they end up putting a sub-par steak into the system as the original pattern.
Tongue out of cheek - it may also be that all the little tweaks needed to make foods safe for all the different biologies in the Federation make it bland. Not sure if they ever made it canon, but an EU source once said that Andorians react to salt the same way humans react to chilli spice. So if you order an Andorian meal from a restaurant, it's likely to be excessively salty to humans because they "spice it up", whereas the replicated version sits at a more tolerable sodium content for other races.
Picard thinks replicated caviar is crap because they lowered the omega-3 content, since it gives Bolians hives in large amounts.
Tongue out of cheek - it may also be that all the little tweaks needed to make foods safe for all the different biologies in the Federation make it bland. Not sure if they ever made it canon, but an EU source once said that Andorians react to salt the same way humans react to chilli spice. So if you order an Andorian meal from a restaurant, it's likely to be excessively salty to humans because they "spice it up", whereas the replicated version sits at a more tolerable sodium content for other races.
Picard thinks replicated caviar is crap because they lowered the omega-3 content, since it gives Bolians hives in large amounts.
