No, poor reception might not necessarily be bad. That's because the FM RF amp uses a standard SK49 FET transistor which is still available. If it is weak or broken, you will get little to no reception. After that, there is the mixer and local oscillator circuits. Then there is the IF amp and another one. In other words, there several few stages and a broken SK49 is probably the easiest and cheapest. The MPX chip should still be available. The two IC's in between however are obsolete. Nobody carries them anymore. So the worse case scenario is if either of those 2 Panasonic IC's have failed, then it's just about a lost cause.
In your case, the fact that signal reception meter shows good strength is an indication that reception is good.
I suggest you flip the band selector many times to see if the weakness is from poor connection from the band switch. This model is very prone to oxidized controls and if you are having poor connection in the band switch, then it is possible that not much audio signal is getting through. You know this is the case if flipping the switch makes some amount of difference in the audio (sometimes better, sometimes worse). If you work the switch aggressively and still observe no improvement or even change, then the next step might be to try swapping that MPX decoder chip. I'm not sure I would call it a beginner type job. Opening the case on this model is no more difficult than any other boombox. However, there is no internal chassis so you would have to work on it in the case since only the back cover comes off on this model.