Let people freely indulge in exploring and having fun with selective focus and the aesthetic qualities of their out-of-focus blur. Seasoned photographers know that ultimately both are just tools in the box, two of hopefully a larger palette to choose from, and skilfully employed based on the intended outcome. Pretty powerful tools, mind you, and ones that are hard to emulate even with the most advanced AI-powered smartphones or editing softwares.
However, where it starts to grate, to my mind, is when the celebration of bokeh is becoming, well, more of an excercise in the photographer's vanity - along the lines of, "Yeah, you lowly creature, look at me shooting my 2,500-euro-3-kilo bokeh monster. Take a hard look, coz you could never even dream of anything like this. My images are
inherently superior to yours because I can shoot
exclusively at F1.4, whereas you will only ever be producing boring medium-aperture images." Okay, I have taken the liberty to shamelessly exaggerate, to the point of caricature, but I think we all know the kind of sentiment, and may have heard it voiced occasionally, or at least implied.
Should anybody feel guilty for treating themselves to such beautiful glass, for using it for what its worth (or, heck, just fondling it from time to time), or for specially seeking out quirky-bokeh vintage glass? Absolutely not. They're all fun and have their legitimate place in photography. I covet that kind of glass too.
To make this all a little less academic, here's some reasonably pleasing bokeh, I'd say, produced at F4 by the cheapest lens in the current Pentax line-up, the plasticky DA50 (a lens that is sometimes said to be a bit clinical or somewhat uninteresting in its rendering):
The DA35 Limited Macro, rarely thought of as a bokeh monster (and sometimes said to have busy bokeh); another shot at F4:
And finally, the DA55-300 PLM, a slow-aperture zoom lens, here at F6.3: