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... interesting point of view. Yet taste matters if you drink your coffee black. It is an acquired taste, but like most things in one's culture, it can be acquired.
(Coffee is easy taste to acquire -- it comes with caffeine which is nice. Same for beer, mutatis mutandis for alcohol. Capsaicin very concretely triggers a burning, painful sensation, yet there are several food cultures built on that.)
The reason I bring is up because one could tie this back to risk-taking, or lack of it. It is not unexpected that some people may look down on adult who doesn't take the culinary risk to acquire taste for common foodstuffs in his culture. Similar principle applies to failing to learn other habits expected of adults in his (to some extent, also hers) culture. The reason for pushback is simple: if enough adults avoid acquiring the expected culture, soon they define the default culture, which is changed and different (poorer, simpler, less complicated from the pushback point of view).
Returning to topic of coffee: It is lamentable that increasing amount of people seem to prefer "milkshakes". I presume coffee-flavored coffeine milkshakes can be produced without any genuine coffee beans. If everyone turns to drinking milkshakes, will there be any interest or capability for producing good coffee?
If it tasted good in the first place you wouldn't have to acquire a taste for it. The more unpleasant a food is by default the more of an acquired taste it is; and as you've noted the cross-section of people who prefer the rough edges of coffee sanded off or covered up is larger than those who like it black.
Maybe it's just that there are other pleasant parts of the taste profile of milkshake-coffee that are much easier to focus on, where the parts of the coffee taste you would otherwise have to acquire are suppressed by doing that.
The problem with hyper-palatability at ground level is that it decreases the amount of unpleasant tastes one would normally be expected to tolerate day-to-day (so on the safety version of the hedonic treadmill, yeah, it'd lead to worse risk tolerance). Tendies only taste like 3 things and they taste the same way every time (the difference between good tendies and bad tendies has to do with the proportions of each taste as well as whether they taste whole or not- actually, good vs. bad has to do with the amount of each flavor, and how much of the [Void] flavor they added- a lot of things I should otherwise like are rendered less enjoyable because they put too much [Void] in it, so they taste [Empty]). Noodles and the wide variety of things you'd put on them are a lot less... predictable.
I guess it's similar to my taste in music in that way: I actively prefer very little (or hyper-specific things that I'm not sure most people even recognize as music), but that doesn't stop me from being able to enjoy (or at least tolerate) a wide variety of other stuff. That said, my ability to intuitively understand them is limited; someone else must act first.
That's also a peer-bonding thing. If I ate nothing but tendies I wouldn't be any fun at dinners nor could I entertain effectively; eating whatever I want whenever I want is a thing I'm consciously aware I'd have to give up if I ever get married.
Considering how the coffee pod culture has shifted into espresso I think the answer is still yes. People will intentionally eat and drink (and in this case, refine) bad-tasting things just for the variety, that's also why the microbrew/IPA culture exists.
Yes, I like to make my meals as inedible as possible too. I guess it helps with portion control, and not being able to even taste the fucking food after the first bite is certainly a way to hide any other bad [or absent] tastes otherwise present.
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