The consumption of most articles of 'culture' is inherently motivated by signalling. There are entire industries and academic departments dedicated to people expressing opinions about which things suck. If someone finds that their desired signal in response to a given cultural article is that of familiarity with condescension rather than familiarity with approval then the same open-mindedness that leads me to tolerate the unappealing-to-me cultural work prompts me to tolerate the various ways of using work in the social dance.

(My own observation is that "it was so bad it was good" tends to be a moderate-to-low status signal except in special cases. Unless there is inherent enjoyment to the task there are likely more socially optimized tactics.)

Excellent point. I didn't consider that the emotional stance I was describing could be what the actual market test was designed to optimize for.

Frequent use of declarations of the form "<people doing something I don't like> is just arrogance" is itself rather arrogant.

Sounds like you've got an ax to grind here ;)