Well, let me say there's lots of ways to enjoy a pipe. A cob full of carter hall out in a canoe is ... sort of a different experience than being offered a bowl of something that hasn't been produced in 40 years... you might choose a super clean pipe and presumably you'd sit back and really try to savor a once-in-a-lifetime smoke. It's not that one is right or wrong, it's that there's different avenues being explored, a different experience being sought.
I'll go all the way back - I smoked tobacco in a pipe for some ten years, on and off, before I really learned how to do it - how to pack it right, light it up, tamp, and smoke gently, tamp carefully, and have the whole thing work out - taste good, not be a soggy mess at the bottom of the bowl etc. Captain Black was the pinnacle of my experience, and honestly, a lot of tobaccos that tasted "tobacco-y" kind of put me off. Pipes to me were about other flavors. Peach and rum medley! I bought a tin of Mixture, and was told that the Mac Baren house flavor was kind of "honey on toast". That sounds nice. And I lit the stuff up and smoked away at it, puffing furiously, looking for that flavor, and basically totally failing to find it. Worked through damned near the whole tin and just... didn't "get it". And at one point, with a pipe just barely lit, because I wasn't paying attention to it at all (probably soldering something or whatever), BAM here's this honey-on-toast flavor, and it's not even sort of in the background, it's front and center. So I did what anyone would do - grabed the lighter and fired that sumbitch right back up! And of course, that flavor just disappeared again. Lots of smoke, no flavor. Sort of a paradox.
And yet if you think about how we get flavor out of tobacco, what is going on, it's a delicate process - "flavor" is oils and esters, big floppy molecules that we experience as "tastes". And if you burn those suckers up, they turn into steam and CO2. And that's what happens especially easily with sweeter blend - you burn it a bit hotter, and all those nice big flavor molecules disappear, literally burnt up, and you suck in smoke that is nothing but vapor and ash, really. But if you are gentle, if you can get the pipe to simmer, I'm talking about a burn where you can have the pipe going for an hour straight and it is maybe... maybe lukewarm, like you can tell it's lit, but it's not hot AT ALL. A little smoke. And the flavor... is almost overwhelming.
So that's how you have to smoke this stuff to enjoy it - you can't haul away at it while you fish. You must pay close attention and really dial in the burn, ultra-low temperature smoldering, and this product opens right up. Many tobaccos can be enjoyed without this kind of careful attention. But almost all tobaccos benefit from it. When I learned how to smoke Mixture and really enjoy it, I took this idea to other tobaccos and they opened up too.
Now this may all be obvious to some, and that's great. Wasn't obvious to me, and when I watch guys on youtube generating monster clouds of smoke, it seemingly isn't obvious to them either! It is, of course, possible to just... not like.. some certain product. But when I've offered Mixure, or more specifically Mixture Flake to unsuspecting pipe pals, and just said "Hey, put this in your pipe, light it up, tell me what you think." I've never had anyone say "Oh, this is bad, why would you smoke this?" Rather the opposite, I've had guys angry, unable to believe that this is Mac Baren's stupid old Mixture. How could I have missed out on this??
And so that's why I say it's normative - it's so beguiling, so perfectly balanced, such a frankly amazing feat of tobacco making, that to me, it's hard to understand someone not liking it, unless they are simply burning it off and not reaching that flavor zone which I (and seemingly some others even in this thread) have found. I call Mac Baren "expert grade" tobacco, and it's not to be a snob, I don't care, it's just that I think you have to really be a skilled, seasoned pipe smoker to be able to get the most out of these blends - I would never recommend Mixture to a new smoker, for example.
Your mileage may vary!
