I found this really interesting to read, perhaps in part because I'm not really coming at it from a slash or a het perspective. I've really never been interested in romance as a genre, in original work or fanfic. It just doesn't really interest me as a thing in and of itself. When I enjoy a pairing, be it one that I really don't see in the source text (e.g. McKay/Sheppard) or one that is total canon (Wash/Zoe) it's purely specific to those characters and that pairing.

However, a lot of the reasons on your list actually ARE some of my reasons for writing about m/m or f/f relationships in my original fiction. For me, romance is only one of a number of different subsets of human experience to write about, but as a writer, I simply find a lot more to interest me in gay romance. It's not only wide-open territory that hasn't been explored all that much in fiction, especially genre fiction, but it also offers a ton of built-in obstacles and angst for the lovers.

My husband once asked me, when I had him beta-read a novella I'd written that was a spy story containing an m/m romance, why I didn't make it a man and a woman instead. And my answer, basically, was why should I? There are a million such stories out there. Take that aspect out, and it's just another James Bond story.