Dan, I'm basically with Michael on this one. My take on the issue is that there is accurate color, and then there is pleasing color. In my discussions with many photographers over a long period of time, I have come to the conclusion that most photographers do not actually want accurate color, despite making that claim. Often it is stated the photographers want the colors in their images to be "as they remembered them" but human memory for color is actually not that accurate (at least not in the physical sense). For instance, we tend to remember grass as being a little greener than it actually was (more yellow-ish in reality). This isn't helped by our long training of seeing captures done with popular films such as Velvia. Sometimes skin tones are really reddish even if we don't want them to look that way in the pictures.
Camera manufacturers understand this concept of accurate vs. pleasing better than anyone else. They've done the market research. It explains why, for instance, Canon used to have the equivalent of its 'neutral' picture style as the in-camera default, but now they've switched to 'standard' -- which is much brighter, more contrasty, more saturated, and much less accurate.
With the new Adobe Standard beta profiles we've tried to strike a balance between pleasing vs. accurate. This is obviously very subjective. The DNG Profile Editor allows one to build custom profiles to optimize colorimetric accuracy, but don't be surprised if you like the Adobe Standard beta profiles more in some (or even many) practical cases.