I can't help but wonder how a sauce invented to mask the taste of rotting meat is now, somehow, considered to be culinary genius.
Sugar. In the South, cuisine is all about two things: sugar and fat.
I'm a New Orleans native. You're not wrong, but... at least there, there is a lot more to it. There, it's like you start with sugar and fat, but have to do a whole hell of a lot more to it before it passes muster. Usually, that "whole hell of a lot more" takes hours to days of careful and considerate shenanigans. Then again, I perhaps undersell how it is here. The sauce is surely just sugar and fat (and a bit of pepper), but the meat prep is insane. That's the twist: the sauce was invented for low-grade, not-keeping-well meat, but is now applied to intricately prepared and marinated top-shelf stuff. It's a strange paradigm that I've yet to get used to even after almost a decade.