Sure - but the OP said they had a top-of-the-line espresso machine, so I took that as a given. Similarly, fresh beans are vital, but the OP said he/she had just bought them.
That's right. I went to the particular store and bought the particular ridiculously expensive beans recommended by the coffee geeks. We did the experiment the next day.
There are at least six degrees of freedom: grind, pressure, volume, water temp, beans, and roast. That's a lot of possible combinations. And my whole point was that despite making my best effort to control all six of them, the coffee still didn't come out good. Not just not good, but actually terrible. Undrinkable. No one could figure out what was going wrong.
What I do know is that I can get consistently good coffee out of my Keurig, and consistently awesomely great coffee in Italy, but nearly nowhere else in the world (and I've been to a lot of places). So it must be possible to control the process. The Italians can't just be getting lucky. But I have no idea what the magic formula is. Maybe it's the water. (Oh no! A seventh degree of freedom!)