Partly. The thing about Mozart is that a lot of old farts like him because the music is unchallenging. A lot of bad orchestras like to play him because he's unchallenging.
A lot of music geeks like Mozart because he's all complex inside and underneath when you dig into the structure and crap.
What the former is missing is that they are old and like to eat plain grits. They're missing the real music.
What the latter is missing is also the music. When you do it right it's like "holy cow". But it's so seldom done right, because that takes more than two rehearsals leading up to a concert on the weekend. There's almost never the time to do it right, even if you have a conductor who knows how to do it right. Very frustrating. I quit playing local gigs because of that. Now I only play if a friend is in need and nobody else is available.
So since you never hear it done right, if you're an intellectual type, you wind up just going "hey, this section of the recapitulation is actually THAT section of the exposition, but upside down and transposed up a step! WOW! OMG!" That sort of thing has never interested me. My brain doesn't get caught by that and go looking for more. My brain goes "oh hey, yeah that is cool. what's on TV?"
We had a seminar with a dude from Michigan Univ. in college. He came in to conduct a group of use college string players, and some community string players, and basically gave us a clinic on chamber music.
We played a Mozart thing, some multi-movement thing, not a symphony, can't remember the name. And we played a couple of 3-minute short pieces, and "St. Paul's Suite" by Holst. We spent maybe a half hour on the 3-minute things, two hours on the Holst, and the rest of the time on the Mozart. That was over THREE DAYS. And I didn't feel like any of the time spent on the Mozart was redundant. I dunno if the audience "got it" like I did, or if any of the other players did either, but it probably ruined me for life.
