Do RPG players dislike depressing settings?, Taking issue with DMG II Options

[Wounded Ronin]

According to Nisarg/RPGPundit, the D&D DMG II (incidentally, dosen't the idea of a DMG II sound kind of excessive?) says that, "your players will expect to play in a world resembling the Middle Ages, but with the harsh, brutal, depressing and serious elements stripped out."

( http://www.xanga.com/RPGpundit?nextdate=5%...090&direction=n )

This kind of surprised me. I remember in D&D first edition you were technically supposed to roll every month to see if a player character came down with any number of diseases. While in a sense the diseases were kind of superfluous because of the Cure Disease spell it's a credit to 1st edition that if you didn't treat the diseases they'd actually errode your stats over time and possibly kill you just like a real disease would do. If you wanted to play a depressing "realist" medieval scenario without Cure Disease the diseases would actually be a constant threat of death hanging over the PCs heads. My point is that as of 1st edition D&D certainly wasn't about having "the harsh, brutal, depressing and serious elements stripped out."

I mean, even remember Oriental Adventures. That setting had a whole social class system you had to roll on during chargen which would influence whether or not society as a whole would look down on you forever due to your ancestry. That's so awesome it makes me want to flip out and bang a geisha who simultaneously wales on an electric guitar or maybe an electric samisen hooked up to an amplifier.

Likewise, Shadowrun is of course explicitly supposed to be a depressing stew of 1980s fears about Japan, corporations, the environment, and global economics where you're a Midwestern auto worker.

Thing is, though, I know that Wizards does their market research. I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't have written about how people don't want something depressing if they didn't have some kind of consumer research backing that assertion up.

What do you think? Is the fact that most people don't want t3h d3pr3ssing in their RPGs? If so, that's kind of grim news for SR.