You're right on about taste vs texture. Often times the tenderness/texture is inversely proportional to the flavor in steaks. Which is why you see many menus placing something like blue cheese on top of beef tenderloin.
However, the "freshness" of beef is in interesting topic. When a cow is slaughtered it is bled and hung in a cooler for about a week. At this point it is usually cut up into primal cuts or sub-primal cuts, sealed in cryovac and sent to the store. At wholesale clubs you can usually buy these whole sub-primals in cryovac. In a normal store the "butcher's" simply cut up the sub-primals into normal size and sell them. The people who work the meat counter in the typical store are simply meat cutters and no longer butchers in the true sense.
Some restaurants keep their meat in the cryovac for extended periods of time and they call this "aging" which is technically called "wet aging". And vastly inferior to dry aging. Dry aging is simply leaving a sub-primal in a temperature appropriate room for an extended period to allow bacteria to break down the meat and moisture to evaporate, thus increasing flavor.
Freshness in terms of beef really means "never frozen". If you freeze beef (or any protein really) then ice crystals form and cause damage to the cellular structure of the meat. This means that juices from the meat will simply exit the meat and never return, no matter how long your rest the meat after cooking.