Not everybody gets the brilliant stuff. Popular stuff is, by nature, that which appeals to the broadest swathe of people. Romance is hugely popular not because it's brilliant or not, but because it focuses on themes that a great quantity of people can relate to. And if you want to get meta about it, romance as a genre, transcends genre (you can have a romantic thread in a space odyssey and it falls under the SF category, but you can't have an historical set in space).

As for the "why the LS fluff?" My answer is that people can get depressed by reading the news, and prefer their fiction with happy endings and noble characters. My personal taste for leaning towards LS fluffiness is that I don't have the brain cells these days for emotionally investing in characters that are just going to end up either dead or asshats at the end of the story. :D