Drums are the loudest of all instruments and much simpler than string or air instruments, but they still have as much subtlety as any other instrument. A good mic will pick up the subtleties that a drum produces, regardless of the volume it is being played at. Inside a drum or cymbal sound are very delicate tones, as well as very overpowering ones.
Out of curiosity, how have you heard puzzlement over this? From other musicians?
No. I've been in the broadcasting, recording and sound reinforcement business for close to 45 years and just wanted to see what other people's views are on the subject. Most people confuse microphone sensitivity with microphone frequency response. Although they go hand in hand, they are not the same. Drums don't have any more subtle and nuances in frequencies than that of the human voice. When you get the hodgepodge of different notes or frequencies when you're playing the kit, most of those subtleties are lost in the mix, especially with the influence of snare sympathetic buzz. If not controlled by corrective tuning, gating or parametric equalization, can mask much of those subtleties.
Microphone "sensitivity" would not be a factor in miking drums anyway. Sensitivity all has to do with the voltage being produced by the microphone for a given sound pressure on it's diaphragm. Most condenser or capacitor microphones have a higher sensitivity, or output because of the electronics or the impedance converters built into the micropohne which are phantom or "T" powered from a battery or external voltage, thus produces more output to the microphone pres in the console. There are some dynamic microphones such as the Sennheiser MD441 that has a very high sensitivity and will interpret the input sound pressure just as well as more expensive condenser mics but with a lower noise floor than that of less expensive condenser microphones. Good condenser mics are great. They exhibit a nice wide flat (peak free) frequency response, responds to very fast transients, very low noise floor and usually have a high SPL rating. A lot of the better dynamic microphones also have most of these attributes.
I use four or five condenser microphones when miking a kit. Two overheads in an XY configuration, a high hat, sometimes but rarely a Neumann U47 FET for the bass drum and if in a studio setting, the room mic. The rest of the mics on the kit are dynamics or "moving coil".
I personally own close to seventy five microphones in my collection from 60 year old RCA ribbons to Neumann U87's and TLM 170 R's. They're something that intrigued me since I was a small child. It's now 2 AM here on the East coast, so if I deleted anything major or mis-typed, sorry about that.
I don't want to ruffle any feathers, this is just from my experience.
Dennis