I used to think 'Genre' was a crutch for inadequate writers
I suspect most novelists start on one side or the other. Either they love literary fiction for its depth, or they love genre fiction for its brute-force appeal. For me, raised on the classics, I used to hold my elitism with an iron fist, and I believed writers who settled for less than perfection were hacks. You could choose one or the other, and most of them chose wrongly.
The truth is that every creative pursuit goes through evolution. Art started as cave drawings, became a prestige statement by wealthy patrons, and now mostly takes the form of anime sketches and Thomas Kinkade rip-offs. It became homogenized, to a certain extent. And the stuff that was an easy sell—the stuff that your average middle-class person was able to look at and say, "Ooh!" is what continued to make economic sense to produce.
Music has an even more obvious canonization. As the Telegraph recently argued, young composers don't dream of writing symphonies anymore; they dream of composing for video games. And as a geek who discovered a love of classical music at an early age and never really grew out of it, I'm actually in favor of this.
Why? Because video game soundtracks are a distillation of the best parts of orchestral music. They're all ambience and mood and adrenaline, without the sudden shifts that accompany the scenes of a movie, or the Largo movement of a Mozart.
Writing has seen a similar development in the form of genre fiction. This term does refer to Sci-fi, Fantasy, Romance, and all the other categories we use to distinguish one book from another, but it also refers to stories written for easy mass consumption, in contrast with literary stories written for more esoteric reasons: innovation and philosophical wandering.
Things aren't this clear-cut, of course. The Lord of the Rings is both genre and literary. But what's interesting is that most fantasy stories, which originally took their cues from Lord of the Rings, decided to grab hold of the things Tolkien only hinted at in abstract ways, and systematize them. Fantasy writers now have terms like "Artifacts," referring to objects of power, and "Monsters," referring to otherworldly creatures. Tolkien had these: the ring, the Palantir, Aragorn's sword Anduril, Lembas bread. And cave trolls; orcs; wargs; Nazgul. But although he included such elements, they all felt organic to his story, and when modern fantasists use them, they feel like banal lip service.
But what's true about music is also true about books. Just as video game soundtracks keep only the most interesting parts of music, so genre is a heavily concentrated form of writing. It relies on plot twists, bold emotions, and frequent action scenes, all of which are calculated to hold reader attention. It includes common tropes that allow distractable people in a rat-race world to quickly grasp the familiar concepts—so the same thing that makes Artifacts and Monsters boring is also what makes them effective.
The reality is that Genre and Literary are points on a continuum, and this allows a clever writer to mix and match. Once you're aware of the strengths and weaknesses of each, you can intentionally pull from the right tradition for any given moment in your story.
And this once again drives home the importance of reading widely. If you want to learn about genre fantasy, read Leigh Bardugo and Brent Weeks. If you want to learn about literary, read Patrick Rothfuss and Ursula K. Leguin. And read outside of genre, too: read Anthony Doerr and Michel Faber and Hilary Mantel.
Most of the pain in writing comes from lacking the tools to tell the story in your head, and the best way to develop those skills is to stand in awe of someone further along the path or past you on the continuum.
And that's why I might ridicule genre writers, but I also tip my hat to them. They've learned to do something that's still a challenge for me, and they've made millions doing it. I might not want to become them, but I will gladly open my eyes and ears to learn from the hard-earned experience of creators who have mastered the parts of writing which, to me, remain a mystery.