Time after time the images that sold the best, won contests, and when I would ask an editor to pick the images for an article I’d written, the images with everything in focus were the ones that had the most success. Most images you see from macro photographers tend to have part of the image in focus and part out of focus. As much as I love soft focus abstracts, the images with full depth of field seems to impress more viewers.
My theory on why people tend to like these images;
If you look around you will see your eyes see everything in focus, so when viewing a photo with everything in focus, it looks natural.
With everything in focus you can easily identify everything in the image.