About once every two or three years I'll pick up a romance (my wife had quite a few scattered around the house before we did a big book donation and she got rid of all the ones she could remember more than two plot points in - this meaning she either "read it but it didn't stick" or she "started it and lost interest" and thus it was one she could part with), just to see how far I can put up with it. If the characters are interesting, that's "all the way" - I made it through about 3/4 of them... Too often the characters are cookie cutter copies of each other, with only the environment different from one story to the next. The few authors who actually put some effort into it put out some decent work, but most ... well, might as well be AI (from what I gather, in the 70s-90s, at least a couple of publishers would "test out" new authors by assigning them romances with a checklist of things they had to include; if they put out something that could sell decently, then the publisher would read their proposals and forward them to the proper division; if they couldn't put together a romance that could sell, they were deemed unable to make anything sellable - and, of course, if they put out a best-seller, they would be "stuck" in the romance department but allowed to use their real name or a pen name of their choice instead of the house name their first novel went out under).
As an aside, there was at least one publisher who had series novels set aside for new authors - TV tie-ins like Star Trek and ongoing serial fiction would be their testing grounds for authors who would not or could not do romance. Still did the "one test novel in that line" thing like the romance ones did, and were more likely to keep writers in those lines if they sold at all (I get the impression that was how the late Peter David got started, before he sold his first comic book script and then got to know enough people in the industry to submit proposals to the people who would approve them rather than to the "gatekeepers")
