Sweet with salty is hardly an anomaly in the culinary world. Salted caramel anyone? Ham glazed with honey anyone? Basalmic glaze over tomatoes anyone?
I've never understood why people get so worked up over this combo. It's totally rational and, for many, subjectively delicious (which is, like you say, all that matters).
No one freaks out when people order food with cilantro even though it literally tastes like soap to some people. They just say "cilantro is not for me, tastes like soap" and get back to their burger or whatever.
They even have a flavor in most restaraunts called sweet and salty which is just sugary syrup added to whatever savoury sauce. So it’s not like it’s an under represented flavour either. Like I get some people have a simple palette that can only handle one flavor at a time. Maybe they can learn to accept all of the rest of us who like combining flavors.
The only reason people get worked up over pineapple on pizza is because there are extremely few places that do it correctly. Most just open a can of frozen chunked pineapples, plop it on and hope for the best. It makes the dish disgusting. Also doesn't help that certain areas of the world prepare the rest of the pie in a completely different manner resulting in very different flavor and texture experiences. A Chicago style with pineapple would be very different from new york style with pineapple.
I've also had properly made pineapple pizza before and subjectively speaking, it was just ok at best. Not anything to rave about or get up in arms about, honestly pineapple has more than just sweet in it's flavor so it still tastes off and doesn't vibe well with the rest of the ingredients like your other examples do. Only a select few people will like it. Probably the same reason most fruits aren't used with pizza like strawberries or cantaloupe.
Combine both those things together though and you get a recipe for a controversial dish.
Might be a regional thing but where I grew up, every place made it, if you ordered for a large group you always included one "hawaiian", and it would be gone while other pizza was left.
There are strong feelings about it but it's like anchovies. A preference.
To me it's like eating your least favorite candy in a mixed bag first - you're left with the best part last. You have to leave just a bit of it so you can still grab it.
E: Also, if you eat all the crusts last they usually go dry and hard instead of nice and warm when you eat them first or as you go along. Depends on whether the dough is good really.
I agree, if you are. Never said anything about force feeding though.
A good dough is just good bread, but anyone who has ever eaten bread will know it'll dry and get hard if it sits out in the open for long enough. And even then, it can make for good breadsticks for sauce or soup or whatever if it's a good dough. Like I said, it all boils down to how good the dough/crust is. I don't really eat shitty pizza with shitty dough though so I don't really have the problem of "force feeding" the crusts. The dough, along with the tomato sauce is one of the most important parts of a good pizza IMO.