I think you misunderstood me.
Yes, ripeness is a valid metric for judging fruit. You can use your senses to judge ripeness fairly well.
However, I was more concerned with nutritional value. As far as I know, your senses are inadequate to inform you if a piece of produce has the trace elements that our bodies need but often do not receive from commercially produced agriculture. Fertilizers are a boon to agriculture, but the focus on P-N-K may leave us with large healthy looking fruit and vegetables that are missing the minute levels of chemicals we need (and that reportedly can be found in organically grown produce).
Of course, I am derailing the comment thread from the GM discussion, so I apologize for bringing organics into this.
Still, I hope @Ishmael understands my point that making food that smells and tastes better is not masking its nutritional value more than normal. That value was already masked when we moved from an agricultural to an industrial-agriculture system and focused on size/look over all other metrics.