Sure, and some peoples' taste will fetch millions of dollars and last for centuries whereas others will be demolished and forgotten within a decade.
Don't you think that phenomenon is worth trying to understand?
Most certainly. Here is my hypothesis. Each individual has some taste function f which assigns an aesthetic enjoyment value to some house appearance. It is unlikely that f varies uniformly or without bound across people, as a certain kind of aesthetic nihilist might think: there are clearly universal trends in aesthetic judgments across cultures. But these trends are weak in comparison to culture-specific preferences. In music, for example, most cultures agree that an octave sounds more pleasant than other intervals, but the other intervals considered consonant/dissonant in Western music are not universal, nor is the concept that dissonance creates tension that needs to be resolved. These concepts form the core of what makes Western music seem good or bad, but they are entirely culturally learned from other people in your social network.
I hypothesize a person's f varies primarily as a function of the social networks they move in. Most people who are into architectural design theory are in very separate social networks from people who buy McMansions, comprising different social classes. So it is likely that they will dislike the things that McMansion people like.
Furthermore, I hypothesize that social groups develop fs partially to foster in-group cohesion and out-group separation, which requires making the out-group seem bad. As such, the people who are into architectural design theory will develop fs which penalize the kinds of things that McMansion people like. So under this theory, this tumblr is just a sophisticated way for one social group to put down another social group.
The question of what tastes fetch millions of dollars and last centuries and what tastes die out, then has to do with which social group ends up having more influence (in addition to the probably very weak universal aesthetic factors).
From this perspective, the screeds against McMansions seem especially distasteful, because the group that has more influence is putting down the taste of the group that has less. It seems like punching down.
An effective argument against this point would be to show that people who buy McMansions don't like them either, and are just forced to buy them because there's nothing better available. That would suggest McMansions violate the aesthetic principles even of the social group that buys them, and contribute to human misery, rather than just violating the aesthetic principles of a highly-educated privileged class.
The above obviously has lots of statements needing qualification and support, which is why it's just a conjecture.
This is your shakiest assumption. Art tends to reflect modes of human experience (how could it avoid doing so) and richly, sensitively evoked experience makes for art that has very broad appeal. Something like Shakespeare is universally popular not for colonial reasons or because it's somehow multivalent (in the sense of being specifically compatible with multiple cultures). It's a deeply satisfying reflection of human nature and a consummate engagement with human experience, which is what architecture should be too.
McDonalds food doesn't claim to be a high-point of human creativity, and it's not. Same story with McMansions.
This is the most intelligent post I've read in the entire thread, and that includes the original blog post. I read through the entire essay, thinking that at some point, the author would mention functional factors such as livability, room-proximity, space and natural light, but it was instead entirely about aesthetic preferences. There's something very off-putting about writing an entire essay insulting people for having aesthetic preferences that differ from yours and your friends'.
