No design will please everybody of course. For me it was just about right.
So the question becomes - what is the best for the majority. What makes a useful default.
Over the years doing usability tests I've seen far more complaints about text being too small, along with no complaints but obvious problems (watching people move their head closer to the screen, etc.).
Putting that together with the fact that almost nobody in the "real world" knows how to zoom in or out. That there are lots and lots of people whose eyesight is not even close 20/20. That as age your pupil size decreases and you just get less light into the eye (see http://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm/ref/collection/EHSL-Moran-Ne... for example). That a bunch of research work on font size and legibility has been done (see the sources on http://guidelines.usability.gov/guidelines/113 for example.)... and I'd rather err on the size of slightly too large than slightly too small.
Again and again I come across designs put together by a designer in their twenties with 20/20 or better vision that just fails miserably when used by "normal" people.
And it will certainly not please everybody. No design pleases everybody. There's a huge amount of non-utilitarian stuff around how people react to designs. Just having things be different from "normal" can cause folk to react badly against something.
I sometimes wonder if the approach some developers have to typography is driven from us spending so much time looking at code full of of long lines where getting the most text possible on the page is utilitarian in ways unrelated to just reading from top-to-bottom.