There is a fairly prominent strain of SF fandom which vehemently rejects all but the most superficial forms of literary analysis. This mostly seems to be due to bad experiences with English Lit classes in high school and/or college, at least based on the long rants they used to uncork on Usenet, back in the day.
I suspect that it is this element of fandom that is responsible for godawful dreck like Mike Resnick’s stories making it onto the Hugo Award ballot. Their rejection of the very idea of thinking about what’s going on beneath the surface level of a story has left them incapable of spotting the point in any story with actual literary virtues. Instead, they end up favoring stories with trite and horribly obvious Morals, whose messages are pounded home with the force of a meteorite strike.
It’s only a theory, of course, but it does seem to explain most of the data plural anecdotes.
(I don’t really have the right readership for this to be a good traffic-driver– maybe I’ll forward it to James Nicoll– but after finishing the Hugo and Campbell nominees last night, I’m a little grumpy about the state of the field…)