Two competent reviewers can describe the same car's ride in opposite terms. This is not carelessness, because ride quality is several distinct properties that a single word compresses.
What ride is actually made of
Primary ride describes how the body moves over large undulations, the slow vertical motion felt on a crest or a dip.
Secondary ride describes the response to small, sharp inputs such as expansion joints, potholes and coarse surfaces.
A car can be excellent at one and poor at the other, and which one a reviewer notices depends heavily on the roads they drove.
Why the two conflict
Controlling body movement over long undulations requires firm damping. Absorbing sharp impacts requires the suspension to move freely and quickly.
A damper cannot be both firm and free at once without adaptive control, so a fixed setup is a chosen point between them.
Manufacturers pick that point according to their market, which is why cars developed on smooth motorways behave differently on broken urban surfaces.
How wheels and tyres change everything
Larger wheels leave less sidewall, and the sidewall is a spring that absorbs small impacts before the suspension is involved.
Bigger wheels also weigh more, and unsprung mass is harder for a damper to control, so the wheel takes longer to settle after an impact.
The same car on two wheel sizes can genuinely deserve two different verdicts, which is why wheel specification belongs in any ride description.
Why load and speed matter
Suspension is tuned around an expected load, and a car carrying one occupant behaves differently from the same car fully laden.
Many cars ride better at speed than in town, because damper valving becomes more effective as inputs arrive faster.
A reviewer commuting through a city and one covering long distances will therefore experience genuinely different cars.
What adaptive damping does to the argument
Adjustable dampers change their resistance in response to conditions, which allows firm control of body movement and compliance over sharp inputs in the same car.
They reduce the compromise rather than remove it, since the range of adjustment is finite and the software must decide quickly what the surface is doing.
A poorly calibrated adaptive system can be worse than a well-judged fixed one, which is another reason verdicts on ride diverge so often.
Selectable modes complicate matters further, because a reviewer who spent most of a loan in the firmest setting has effectively assessed a different car from one who left it in its softest.