Uhm, I would not hold the Orions out as a 'good' example, there are many pans of that speaker. Personally, never heard them, so can't say myself.
However, there's no question that dipole speakers trying to operate below 200Hz have serious issues with low-frequency performance, since physics comes into play once the length of wave is greater than 1/2 and really falls off at 1/4 the distance between front and back acoustic sources on the dipole, the sound cancels or at minimum starts introducing comb-filtering.
While pleasant dipole systems exist, and your Apogees are definitely one of the few out there, they all run out of gas at some point due to this phenomena. No cheating mother nature
I do disagree with the position that "ou want dipole bass with a dipole panel for consistency of approach & therefore sound across the frequency spectrum", as below the Schroeder frequency (typically around 300Hz in most home rooms), the modal response dominates, and how one energizes the room at those frequencies is insensitive to dipole vs monopole. What I think most people like about dipole bass as compared to sealed or vented monopoles is the lower driver distortion and Q a dipole arrangement can have.
But truly low distortion bass can be had in copious quantities with an Infinite Baffle alignment, as it bring the benefits of equal air-pressure loading, lower Q etc of dipole but with none of the downsides of cancellation. I've heard a lot of expensive bass systems, none can touch a good IB.
For mid-bass, I also still prefer either a large array of sealed drivers operating well below their distortion limits such as my center line array, or a stack of small drivers in transmission line alignments, which also deliver very clean and consistent output.
