Why the Olive Garden Hate?

There seems to be a new trend in a lot of movies and television shows I've seen lately, making fun of Olive Garden. Usually it's in the form of joking about how taking a date there is less than classy. Even an episode of WWE Monday Night Raw took a shot at Olive Garden. You know it's bad when wrestling feels free to take potshots at you. As one of the world's biggest Olive Garden enthusiasts I feel the need to defend it.

I don't get the hate. Sure, it's not quite some French fine dining establishment, but I ask you, which is the more favorable scenario

Scenario 1: You drop a crap load of money on an exotic gourmet meal and spend the rest of the evening thinking that the other person had better live up to the figure on the bill. It's like when Mike Ditka was running the New Orleans Saints and traded all their 1999 draft picks and their 1st and 3rd round picks in 2000 just to be able to draft Ricky Williams at the #5 spot in 1999. There was no way the guy could have ever lived up to that.

Scenario 2: On the other hand lets say you go to the mid-price ranged olive garden, get a good meal, and don't pay a fortune. As a result there's far less pressure on both sides to live up to the cost of the meal. I see passing up the glitz and glamor of a fine dining establishment as a parallel to the famous "Herschel Walker Trade" back in 1989 where Jimmy Johnson gave up Walker to the Vikings for a boatload of draft picks that helped establish the Cowboy dynasty of the 1990s (Most notably the draft picks the Cowboys got wound up becoming Emmitt Smith, Darren Woodson, and Russell Maryland).

There's no shame in loving the Olive Garden, even bringing a date there, just think of yourself as Jimmy Johnson.