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Color photos look like real life so when they are super overcooked with ridiculous unrealistic contrast you are more inclined to reject them because they don't look like what you know they should look like. Black and white is already an abstraction and is obviously not a representation of the real world so you are more willing to accept a lot more manipulation and processing because you know it's just a photo and it isn't meant to depict a real scene.
That's my theory, anyway. I also think that's sort of why people are more willing to accept a noisy black and white photo rather than a noisy color photo, although that's also partly because converting to black and white will reduce the noise anyway since it removes color noise and leaves only luminosity noise.
