I think it's a fandom thing, largely, the text/subtext confusion. We've all trained ourselves to go subtext-mining and forget that it's part of the community, and not necessarily everyone outside of fandom does it.

That's actually a really good point! We (as in fandom at large) are used to looking for it, so we see it, expect everyone else to see it and, therefore, it's THERE right? Even when it's not.