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GabrielDuquette comments on Things you are supposed to like - Less Wrong
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My suspicion is this:
You can learn to appreciate anything that requires creativity if you understand what they're trying to do and stuff like that. It starts out that they're creatively trying to accomplish something, like making a soothing sound in this case. Once people start appreciating it for the art, rather than just sounding nice, people will then create it for the art, rather than to sound nice. After a while, you end up with an art form that's very different than what it started as. It's still good. It's just something completely different, and each will look bad if you don't realize it's what you're looking at. Never read a literary masterpiece if you want a nice story. Never read a popular story if you want a literary masterpiece.
I think it's the job of storytellers to wind up exactly in the middle. They should tell useful, nuanced truths in a way that doesn't exclude anyone who might benefit from them.
I like variance on both those axes existing. That way there will be stuff in that middle for me. Not everybody will agree on where that middle is.
What's a nuanced useful truth to some may be obvious to others. What's an oversimplification to someone can be hopelessly complex to someone else.
If you try to please everyone you end up pleasing nobody, yadda yadda.
(Though some people probably can write really awesome and universally accessible stuff. I just don't want to hold everyone up to that standard because then I'd have waaaay less stuff to read.)
In this case, if you try to please everybody, you'll probably please people with similar tastes as you.
They still have the trade-off. They're just awesome enough that they can do better at both than you can do at either. They could have made it even more artistic, at the cost of being less accessible, or more accessible, at the cost of being less artistic.
I think you may have merged your response with the quotes (you need to have a blank line between the last line of a quote and the first line of non-quote text).
Fixed. I do that a lot, but I normally catch it.