I drink things that taste bad. No, not always. But when an option exists that I think might taste bad, I always choose it. Someone has determined that it is a worthy drink and unless I explore their thinking, I will never know whether or not I agree. Once explored, I have some data that I can use to compare with other implementations of such an horrific recipe. At once, I am a connoisseur of this awful thing.
Let me know if you are interested in the worst place to get a bean-paste mojito with a cactus apple sidecar. I still search for the best.
It seems like, in most domains of aesthetic appreciation, it doesn’t take all THAT much “trying stuff” before you get off a “bad-to-good” axis and onto a “varieties of experience” plane… (mumble mumble decommodification etc)
Then again perhaps you and I are showing our hand as people whose aesthetic preferences are not to be trusted :)
Similarly consider the people who build world-class systems in their day jobs, yet spend their weekends running Doom on potatoes or battling janky bots to the death.
Cultivating taste doesn’t have to be the same thing as developing snobbery or becoming jaded.