OK, here's my mostly unsupported opinion on the subject:
There are two main reasons why we play games: challenge and emotional experience.
Challenge is the big one, the evolutionary reason why playing games is hardwired into the brains of most of Kingdom Animalia. A game provides a safe challenge for honing a skill; a situation where there's no real penalty for failure and no real reward for success. If an animal learns a skill by using it in the real world, it's going to die (and maybe take down the rest of the pack) if it doesn't get it right on the first try; but if it learns it by playing a game (say, the stalk-and-pounce-and-tussle games any kitten plays), there's no penalty for failure. In other words, games are a training simulator for reality. A safe challenge is fun (don't deny it, you lot know you have more fun earning your victories than cheating or otherwise fixing the contest) because pleasure is evolution's way of making sure you keep doing something.
The emotional experience of a game, though, is mostly specific to human beings, and it's similar to why we read fiction. Emotional experience is known by many names among the gaming community: realism, story, and immersion, to name a few. A good emotional experience (note that I'm using "good" in the sense of "well-made" rather than "pleasureable") makes the player feel what the protagonist is feeling. In a good experience, the characters seem real. In a good experience, the player will either love or hate the game, there's no "Meh..." about it.
So, how is this relevant? Different people will like different types of challenges and different types of experiences. Some people love fast-paced games, others like thoughtful games. Some people like Dark Fantasy, others perfer Humor. In other words, it's not just cooks who need to remember "De gustibus non desperandum."
And now, the #*$%ing point. When Chris Crawford [http://www.erasmatazz.com] published "Trust and Betrayal: The Legacy of Siboot" in '87, it was a commercial flop. (For those who don't know, T&B is a game based on social reasoning, with a thoughtful and contemplative atmosphere and realistic characters.) There's no denying that some people liked the game; it was a cult favorite and I'm pretty sure there's still some fansites floating around. So why did it fail? Because its target market wasn't (and still isn't) exactly established. It was a flop because, while it did appeal to some tastes, those tastes were refined/uncommon/wierd and a fair number of gamers in that day were social rejects and much more into the "killkillkill" experience than the "tear-jerker" experience. Moving out of the historical context and into the present day, we are now in a position to understand the abuse heaped upon turn-based games.
Intentionally distorted statistics aside, the vast majority of gamers are teenage males whose tastes have not yet matured and seek cheap thrills and instant gratification. They tend not to like games calling for deep thought and patience. They much perfer games of action. They want the designer to let them vent their hormonal angst and sexual frustration by placing as much blood, butts, buicks, and bucks in the game as can be crammed into the CD.
Now then, a TBG calls for thought (unless you've ground up to the level of being able to kill anything with a flick of your index finger). It calls for patience (at least navigating through menus). As it aims for more sophisticated players,it tends to have a storyline that most people would term "artisticly semi-valid" (no unnessecary graphic violence, pointless nudity, or gratuitous commercial/consumer/material -ism). Is it any wonder that they come under fire from players so often?
