As much as I see your frustration, I am one of those newbies who logs all of my visits. I do write TFTC a lot, mainly because I don't have much else to say. Not necessarily because I thought it was a "bad" cache.
Your description of a bad cache does indeed meet the bill for a lot of my finds, but to me the game isn't about the great locations or the great scenery or even the great cache containers. It's about having fun with my friends, like the night me and my boyfriend went to a park to find one that was impossible to find in the dark, but we found anyway. Or the other day when my friends har rehearsal in church for their wedding, and I found one across the street at a bus pole. It's about the memories and fun surrounding the caches that matter. And I must admit I also do it as a collectors thing, I like collecting caches, even though they might be "crappy". The "hunt" is more enjoyable to me than the actual prize, but then again, that's my opinion! I live in the biggest city in my country, and naturally there can't be too many big boxes, we have a lot of micros for that reason.
I also loved the food analogy. You can look at it in a different way, if you are going to go see the next Hobbit movie thats coming out around christmas, and you are a HUGE Tolkien fan, you might have some pretty big expectations to the movie. Now I asume it will be great anyway, but you might find that the director and the actors didn't portray it in quite the matter you wanted to. Does it mean it was a bad movie? Maybe, did you have too high expectations? Maybe that too.
I don't doubt that geocaching was something else before "everyone" got in to it. And I also don't doubt the quality of the game has "gone down" since more people started doing it. It's kinda like a band is cool until everyone knows about it, and you were the guy who liked them for two years before they actually became famous.
I recommend as everyone else you do your preparations according to what you are after. Definetly filter out those micros, and the easier difficulties too. I however enjoy them. They might be simple, they might be "just another count" -but to me, they give me a sense of accomplishment. And also remember, everyone out there might not be able to hike that trail, or climb that wall, and for those, some easy access one matter all the more.
I just placed my first one, and it is the easiest little thing in the world, and close to where I work. I hope it gets approved, but I also hope I don't have to get the "your cache sucked" back because I have a micro/easy. I did it for me, because I'm on #75 right now and I liked them all! People are different, and that's ok too
(PS -sorry for the long post, lots of thoughts on the issue I guess)
