One form the complaints are taking, at least from the more savvy film reviewers who are aware that Video Games Exist, is that the movie in HFR looks too much like a video game. Games intentionally go for that kind of clarity, like you say, since most games try for that hyper-clarity of complete "you are there" immersion. (And, of course, games aren't yet great at doing motion blur consistently, since it's something that has to be explicitly implemented).

It really highlights that the complaints about HFR are just making it explicit that moviegoers don't want reality — hand-held cameras, first-person views, and all the other pseudo-documentary stylistic tics seem more like artifice than reality, since the language of film is already established and accepted implicitly.

The other interesting thing is that I've read people who grew up in the UK, or watched a lot of British programming growing up, have less of a problem with it. American audience — well, me at least — always found it jarring whenever a British show would switch between film and video depending on whether they were indoors or outdoors. I guess if you watch enough of that, it just becomes part of the "language" and doesn't seem particularly odd to see fiction playing out at video frame rates.

I hadn't heard about the visual fatigue argument; that's interesting. I do know that whenever I've seen Avatar playing on one of those fancy motion-smoothing TVs at Best Buy, I absolutely hate it.