I read books to have fun, and litfic isn't really fun for me. I absolutely acknowledge that I read schlock -- mostly progression fantasy these days -- because it's immediately fun and engaging to me. If I wanna think harder, I read about politics and current events, or work on side projects, or maybe play a strategy or puzzle game.
Yeah, this is basically the argument of the op. That somewhere in the 70s, that whole genre started to target critics as the audience instead of the general population and sales have been dwindling since that alienation.
