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I am one of those people who has “spirited” discussions about the proportions of new kits…
Basically, the choice of proportions can have a huge influence on the overall character of the design. Like you can make a figure look brutish by emphasizing the size of the arms and upper body, you can make it look more heroic by making it taller, etc.
At a very basic level, most people just want these robots to “look cool” – proportion can have a big impact on that. Personally I often also want the proportions to match those of the original design, because different artists create a variety of different effects with the form and proportions in their design, and I want to represent that – and I feel that Bandai too often homogenizes all that away.
One of the reasons Bandai gets proportions “wrong” sometimes (or at any rate, different from what some people might hope for) is because they’re not just designing for looks, they’re designing for play value as well. For instance, it’s typical for these mecha designs to have very long lower legs – because it looks cool. But if you want to get the robot into a good kneeling pose, it helps if the upper leg and lower leg are more balanced. Or a lot of designs have kind of short arms – to emphasize the bulk of the rest of the machine, I guess – but if the arms are too short, they can’t reach around the front of the chest to get a two-hand grip on a weapon.
Basically, yeah, it’s all about preferences. What looks good, or what satisfies the preferences of the modeler.

As tetsujin said before, people argue about these things because some are more hard-core fans of the anime. More or less this is done on various forums and, apart from tetsujin who, like he said, likes his kits to look as close as to what the original designer wanted it to look like, there are quite a few (if not a lot more than a few) that just want their mecha to look as awesome as they can regardles of the original design. Heck, a lot of people buy gunpla without ever watching an episode or reading a manga about it and are clueless about the original design. I have a few friends like that that don’t give rats ass for the story, characters, names of the mecha etc just as long as it has lots of weapons and just looks awesome. Hence the reason Sinanju’s so good selling kit. As for me, I’m with tetsujin on this, I even paint my kits in the same exact colors, or as close to the original design as I can, mostly using gundam wiki as a reference point.

as has been said people mostly want their kit to look cool, personally I would love if everything was the right size, not necessarily to human proportions, we should keep in mind these are supposed to be machines not actual suits of armor so they wouldn’t necessarily be built to human proportions, but rather sizes matching the original design, after all they’re supposed to be to scale so everything should be to scale but that’s not always possible, for instance if it would make the plastic too thin to be manipulated without breaking, and ofcourse sacrifices need to be made for the sake of posability. Also in the case of some kits scale is sorta impossible for various reasons, with the zoids line scale is impossible cause the show makes a complete mockery of size having a given zoid shown at various sizes at different times, or even gundam due to some of the transformation mechanisms certain mobile suits/armors have.