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No, I was correct. Like the 'average' distance of a gunfight is supposed to be 20 feet or so. 50 percent are inside, 50 percent are outside that distance.
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Not really. Let's have 10 gunfights. 9 of them occur at 5 feet, 1 is at 155 feet. The average (your definition) distance in the fights is 20 feet, but 9 (90%) are inside the average while only one (10%) is outside. That is why the median is important for, as Glenn put it, understanding "actual distributional properties".
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Average didn't mean squat to those on the Titanic.
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Putting aside which definition of "average", of course it did. Using probability one could easily have seen that if there was an incident being female or juvenile significantly improved the chance of living, as did your assigned rooms on the ship. The average survival rate was strongly influenced by those factors.