IIRC, wine tasting isn't bunk, wine pricing is. People can tell the differences between wines, and reasonably reliably if they are trained, but those differences (and the tasters' preferences) have weak/no correlations with $$$.
Not as much as you'd think. In this article [1], one expert failed to identify that a white wine dyed red was the same. They used different descriptors for the same wine.
And none of this should be too surprising. Our brains are complex things that like to hallucinate details. If you tell someone a bottle of wine cost $1000, their brain will happily invent reasons why it's one of the best wines they've tasted.
I wonder whether something similar applies to spirits. I feel absolutely sure that I could tell the difference between, say, a long-aged rum and an unaged one. But if you added food coloring to an unaged one and told me it was aged, would my brain invent oak barrel flavors behind my back? Who knows.
You can always give yourself a blind taste test. Get two (or more) opaque bottles, add the various rums in test, mark the bottom of the container for the type of rum, mix it up and see if you can reliably tell the difference.
My assumption is you could because that oak flavor is pretty strong, but who knows.
Worst case scenario is you find out you still prefer expense alcohol :)
