(Sorry for the late reply! Caught a cold and spent most of my time reading.)
All right, let me know if the soup's good. Unless I cook it before you, then I'll let you know.
Yes, it would host the annual Hylian X Games! And we’d also have the awesomeness of Extreme Ironing.
Yes, it would be nice if quality more closely correlated to popularity. The subjectivity of it sometimes gets in the way, but I think in general a lot of titles would have a larger fanbase if more people had only heard of them.
I agree, hating Twilight is very much blindly following a fad. Hating anything to that extent is usually similar. It’s okay to dislike, or not have enjoyed something, but hating on it is rather ridiculous. As for myself, I’ve only seen a glimpse of the Twilight movies, and have not read the books, so I can’t really judge it either way. (From what I saw though, the acting in the movies looked poorly done. A lot of books turned into movies are far worse than the books they were based on though.)
I’ve read the first two books in the His Dark Materials series, they were creative and well written. I’m afraid I disagreed with the underlying allegory though, so I can’t sincerely say I loved them. I also can’t say I’ve kept much track of how popular it is, but I think it might appeal to a larger base if people had heard of it.
I’ve read the Harry Potter books, I’d agree that it has something to offer and I’m glad it’s popular. A lot of good series do go relatively unnoticed though. Perhaps it’s partially a matter of being the right book at the right time in the right place to gain such levels of popularity.