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Of course hearing Susan sing was the whole lesson to be learned here. Duh. Ya can't always judge a book by it's cover.

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The general assumption gleanable from late 20th century multimedia (television / movies / internet) is that people excelling in one domain should be equally skilled in other, often opposing domains (singing, dancing, physical beauty). I guess this is convenient for marketing purposes (until tastes change), but is ultimately hollow, and leads to decision makers settling for what are called local maximums, such as the best singer who is also half-way decent looking, rather than the best all-out singer.

Many of the acclaimed female vocalists / singers I can think of aren't (and never were) particularly physically attractive, including :
Barbara Streisand
Aretha Franklin
Diana Ross
Ella Fitzgerald
Nana Mouskouri
Tina Turner
Liza Minelli
...just off the top of my head.

Many of these women are average looking; some are downright hideous by modern standards of beauty. However, they were experts in their domain, and persevered in creating audio that transcended the limits of their surface features.

It says a lot about what the audiences have been trained to expect that listening to a singer is only considered palatable if they are also nice to look at.

On a similar note, I keep seeing clips in the news from Britney Spears 'Circus' tour, where she is widely agreed to be lip syncing and doing no actual singing, but rather is prancing around a stage for an hour and a half while mouthing in time with an iPod on speakers. The ticket buyers seem to be mostly adults and twenty-somethings, which doesn't reflect well on them as arbiters of taste, but rather on their ability to be sold a bill of goods.

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A lot of people considered Janis Joplin to be unattractive. I remember reading about the cruel hoax pulled on her where a fraternity voted her "The ugliest man on campus" Nana Mouskouri was pretty cute when she was younger.