... as for the item above, about the New Esterházy Quartet's program, Michelle Dulak Thomson has also this to say:
There are a couple of those very early Schubert quartets that really do declare the reasons they aren't played very often. The first movement of D. 36 comes to mind. By the end of the movement you want to shake young Franz by the shoulders and yell, "Enough with that two-bar motive already! You are lacerating my nerves."There is a reason that Beethoven cycles and Mozart cycles and Bartók cycles and Shostakovich cycles and even Haydn cycles are more commonly performed than Schubert or Dvořák cycles.
The weakest music in the Schubert and Dvořák quartets is so much weaker than the strongest that it doesn't really make sense to bundle them. There are earlier Schubert quartets (earlier than the late four, I mean) that repay the effort: the G Minor, the E Major, the E-flat Major, the later B-flat Major.
Otherwise, there are other early pieces that would never in a million years get played at all if they weren't by Schubert. In the same way, no one would play the Schoenberg D Major if his name were not on it.
Michelle may not agree, but I think another very early Schubert, the existing fragment of his String Quartet No. 2 in C major D. 32, sounds pretty good in recordings, such as the one by Artis, and also available on YouTube, by the Takeuchi String Quartet.