> If you ask people what they want, they say: "good color reproduction" but if you let them loose in a big box store they all gravitate to the brightest most blown out sets.

Big box stores are usually brightly lit (which is usually compounded by having all the light-emitting TVs next to each other, whatever their brightness setting is); human perception of color is strongly influenced by background, and in that environment not having a set configured at the brightest makes it looked dull and washed out rather than seeming like accurate reproduction of color.

This is, of course, very different from what looks good in typical use conditions.