How do you make a bad spiritous drink?

My tastes tend to polarize into single spirits and sour cocktails so the rarer spiritous cocktail tends to taste either excellent or mediocre to me. The ones I haven't enjoyed seem to universally be due to poor ingredient quality and/or technique. This makes me wonder if spiritous cocktails are far less sensitive to the recipe than other drinks.Obviously, poor technique could be a problem -- using low-quality ingredients, or expired vermouth; improper dilution through insufficient/excess stirring or small or wet ice in the glass would all result in a sub-par spiritous drink.But at the recipe level, how hard is it to screw up a spiritous drink? If you made two Manhattans identically except one had half the vermouth, could that ruin it for the drinker, or would it simply be a variation?In a sour cocktail, the exact proportions seem far more sensitive and it's relatively easy to make the drink too strong/sour/sweet without careful testing (despite the general 2:1:1 rule of thumb, I still find significant variation depending on the exact ingredients). And when creating or changing a recipe, it's even easier to make it too muddy with too many complementary flavors.Do any of these issues apply to spiritous drinks? Maybe muddiness? Lack of bitters and/or aromatic garnish?It seems like what would be by far the most likely to turn someone off of a spiritous drink would be 1) they just don't enjoy such strong drinks and 2) they don't like the base spirit which tends to dominate any spiritous drink by definition. Muddiness and proportions seem to be a fairly distant 3) and 4).Does this make sense to anyone else? Am I missing anything? http://www.reddit.com/r/cocktails/comments/3exuf7/how_do_you_make_a_bad_spiritous_drink/