I tend to agree, and I think it might be a counter-intuitive stance in a world where the mere act of reading has been moralized and turned into a virtue in and of itself - "reading is good for you", no qualifiers, no caveats.

I'd go as far as to say that the equation of reading to a moral good leads to many of the moral panics towards any slightly "unsavory" topic/approach/narrative in literature ("there's a rape scene, this book is bad!"), which, in turn, favors the corporate blandness of YA.