Yes, the mindset of "either you're good enough to win everything or you're not good enough" fits perfectly with the archetype fan who is not a fan of the sport or even really of the particular team or athlete they've chosen, but a fan of winning. Find me a Manchester City fan over the age of 15 who doesn't have a Manchester accent, and I'll show you one such person. Similarly, most people who support Real Madrid don't fall in love with the iconic history and tradition of the club, they fall in love with the idea of the Galácticos, so watching the same style of football but played by lesser talents elsewhere doesn't suffice for them. They're only interested in seeing the best, and the resulting consistent victory lends to a very dismissive approach towards anything below the very best. Like, I know some fans would rather watch a bad race between the best than a good race between a lesser field, because they can't get as invested in the better race because they don't feel it as valuable in the lesser field, but especially in an endurance sport like cycling, where you aren't groomed as a talent through a pro team's academy from single digit age groups, how does one expect that those people who are the best became the best in the first place?
And really, is the field that bad? This is fairly standard for a 2.1 race nowadays. A few World Tour odds and sods riding for form, a few ProContis and some small teams making up the break fodder. The only such races you will find with significantly better startlists at this status are races like the Ruta del Sol, Algarve and some of the 1.1 semi-classics - most of which are pre-season and tune-up races. The days of 2010 and the Vuelta a Castilla y León featuring Contador, Mosquera, Soler and Antón duking out the mountaintops, and Coppi e Bartali with Sella, Riccò, Basso, Scarponi and Pozzovivo battling are gone. The combination of the financial crisis impacting, shortening and lessening races, and the increased Premier League-ification of World Tour cycling (partly a product of the weakening of the national calendars, and partly a product of UCI having to protect their investment from teams like Cervélo and BMC finding the loophole that let them buy a cheaper ProConti licence, spend the balance on elite riders, and get invited to any race they wanted while not having to do the UCI's globalisation project races like Beijing) means that you don't have a super-strong field of ProConti teams in Spain, Italy, Belgium and France to keep these races at a high level anymore. Back in 2010, the ProConti ranks had Evans, Ballan, Sastre, Hushovd, Voeckler, Hoogerland, Carrara, Visconti, Mosquera, Scarponi, Pozzovivo, Garzelli, Paolini, de Waele, Westra. Now we're lucky if we could find a third of that number of elite names, and riders of comparable level, instead of leading ProTeams, are domestiquing at WorldTeams, and the domestic calendars aren't strong enough to sustain ProTeams at a level as competitive as Vacansoleil, Xacobeo-Galicía or Androni Giocattoli could be back then, let alone Cervélo and BMC.