Just an aside: There's especially the fun in-between. I had the amazing fortune of getting to see a cross-section of the TSO perform all of the music to Home Alone live while they displayed the movie on a screen above stage. It was fantastic. What a treat.
All this spoken as someone who spent a good portion of his 20's playing 'small-ensemble' and solo around cheap clubs in Toronto. (And continue to nurture those delusions happily into my 30's, and I'll never stop)
(Just another fun aside: my brother in law happens to be a player in the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and I'm pretty sure we're both jealous of each other to some extent)
Of course, I agree about that wrt. music in general. My cautionary comments about appreciation being both hard and not seriously engaged in, as a matter of fact, by many listeners were specifically about commonly-performed orchestral music. (Some people might even consider that alone "real music", while excluding that status for movie soundtracks and the like. Of course, this is self-defeating if you actually care about "real music" being more broadly appreciated: lighter works are a necessary stepping stone to that lofty goal.)
(Just open up your favorite music publishing platform and see how common it is to market just about any piece of orchestral music as something purposely bland and good for "relaxation". Needless to say, this is not what real appreciation looks like. It's not even a "shallow" level of engagement with the music itself.)
People who show up to listen to an orchestra—it doesn't matter on what level they're enjoying it, it serves to enrich lives regardless and on many planes.
I think your beef might not be with music appreciation, and the modern role of an orchestral performance and more with the commoditization of music. That's more of one of the cancers of marketing (hashtag notallmarketing). That kind of marketing only aims to make everything cheap to supply and as profitable as possible to the 'sticky' middlemen. I would agree with you there.
There's room to disagree about that. Especially with orchestral music, the reality is that so much of the audience is simply there out of habit and not "real aficionados" as you say. Which means they're not really grokking any of the music and do not really care about anything besides the old "workhorse" pieces. The widely-acknowledged outcome is that, far from being actively preserved, much of the potential repertoire simply languishes in obscurity.
There are of course forces pushing against this unwanted dynamic, such as a renewed appreciation for solo and small-ensemble/chamber music (which can at least be easier to understand for the novice listener), as well as recreational engagement with the artform outside the concert hall. In many ways, this is a reaffirmation of the "natural" environment for this sort of music where recorded music was either non-existent or uncommon, and actively playing music was an increasingly accessible, everyday activity.