"Unnecessarily wide" and "too much power" and "too much Bass" and "obnoxious" and "rude" and other equally subjective terms are all a matter of opinion.
If someone sounds bad through a narrow filter they have a problem. I'm not against essb when used responsibly but if someone with a narrow receiver says you sound bad you should probably take a look at your eq settings. Something in that narrow range is preventing you from sounding as good as you could. I would take it as constructive criticism and fix it.
Agreed. Bob Heil's solution is a 4 dB boost at 2 KiloHertz. "The traditional Heil +4 dB peak centered at 2 kHz gives the new HM-12 excellent voice articulation balanced with clean, clear low-end response producing a high quality AM, FM or SSB signal. The HM-12 microphone has an internal foam windscreen and includes a 5/8"-27 microphone clip that is designed for our booms and desk stands." http://www.dxstore.com/heil_microphone.html If you're going to run over 3 kHz in the SSB mode, you need to make sure everyone can understand you.
It can be annoying. I rotate my passband tuning a few degrees to eliminate the component beneath about 100 Hz.
It's all about being a good radio neighbor. Some of us have problems pulling that off. Radio forums display that very concept daily. Do I get annoyed when trying to pull out the weak signals when some guy "needs" to run full legal limit at 6khz wide only 2 or 3 khz away from the weak signal dx I'm trying to copy? Hell yes, but what can I do about that? Nothing. Just log the noisy ape and vow to never work him is about all I should do about it, because a$$holes will be a$$holes and there is no cure (legal) for that.
Is it possible that we are just more aware of fat signals these days. We can look at a waterfall on a radio or computer and immediately see that someone has an excessively wide signal, but back before the waterfall I'm not sure your average ham was monitoring that sort of thing. Just throwing it out there....this might not be as new of a problem as it appears.
In the contest between "my opinion," on one hand, and "perfectly legal," on the other hand... I try not to be "that guy."
Full disclosure, I also experiment with narrowing the SSB bandwidth. I like to see what can be considered understandable. There is lots of fun in the wee hours when few are around. What I am currently lacking is predistortion. I long for playing with squeezing the BW down + predistortion and moving very close to others doing same in some planned minimal-QRM but understandable QSO. I'd like to figure out some autotune scheme to move in tight per a certain signal to adjacent channel noise. I think this is more of an interest versus eSSB sounding like VoA (but that is just me). Then we nSSB-ers (narrow SSB) will throw stones at the stoneage guys. Oh, wait wat?!!? I'm an OF. I have plans for voice recognition (not new tech) plus AI to use in contests. I don't like contests and imagine pressing the envelope of the rules. I'm a '60s kid.