Romantics in science fiction, revisited

A while back, I did a post about romance in science fiction, but I'm revisiting this topic because of two reasons. One, because the topic of a romantic science fiction universe and romanticized universes and plot lines in general are deeply fascinating for me, after watching such universes as "Dune" from Frank Herbert and "Star Wars" by George Lucas, I just love watching world-building exercises, like these two series do a masterful job of, and more recently, "Halo" and "Mass Effect," are both romanticized views of the future, but, romanticism, as seen in Halo and Mass Effect, doesn't have to always be positive. Romantics in this type of science fiction are usually negative, such as the Covenant, a massive alien religious society that starts a 25-year war with humanity in Halo, somewhat reminiscent of the Ottoman Turks' genocide against the Balkan Christians  during the Renaissance, or the Swedes' Protestant genocide against Bavarian Catholic women during the Thirty-Years' War in the 17th century. The extrapolation of history onto the fictional Halo universe, set in the year 2552 A.D., is obvious to someone who understands the thinking behind the historical romanticism. "Mass Effect" depicts humanity in the same type of scenario as it was after Columbus discovered the New World, colonizing new planets and meeting new races after discovering light-speed travel. Mass Effect is more of a classic romanticism, with a rosy view of humans challenging the unknown and emerging victorious over Nature. This, however, ends very quickly and turns extremely negative with the discovery of the 'Reapers,' an armada of aliens that emerges to consume everything in the galaxy, and then recycles the energy, as per the First Law of Thermodynamics, leaving the hero character, Commander Shepherd, to try and stop the Reapers' advance. In this way, romantics are actually quite common in science fiction, but they usually aren't seen as such because the way things are romanticized is often very negatively. The second reason that I'm revisiting this topic is just how few academic journals talk about romance in science fiction, if you enter "Romance in Science Fiction" into JSTOR, Gale Group, or EbscoHost, you will only find 2 scholarly documents of any credibility, no more, no less, trust me, I looked. Those documents only contain 3 pages of information, and one document even went so far as to say "Romance, in SF, does not exist." Why is it that science fiction writers and journalists alike are so afraid of using the word "romance" when describing a science-fiction story, when there is so much romanticism being thrown around? How could scholarly journals in the world's databases blatantly ignore and deny the existence of something I see everywhere? Are these people, professors and scholars blind?! What is clear is that romanticism is very common, but actual romantics, as in, characters in love, is very, very seldom seen as a major plot device in SF. If it's present, it's usually just a subplot, like in Mass Effect, with Shepherd's romance with several characters in the video game series, the romance between Anakin Skywalker and Padme Amidala in Star Wars, or the decidedly Machiavellian pseudo-romance between the two star-crossed dystopian architects Misa Amane and Light Yagami in Death Note. Perhaps authors are afraid that if they make romance the main plot in an SF novel, it become more of a genre-identity crisis, do you classify the work as a true SF novel, or a romantic one? Furthermore, how do you make a "sci-fi romance," if such a thing exists, and make it good, as in, not sound too pedantic, cliché and like something out of the realm of bad fan-fiction? Few authors actually venture to experiment with that, for fear of critical disapproval, and I think that's a shame. There is so much that could be done by blending SF and Romance genres, its just that no one has bothered to try writing something like this. Just look at horror and romance, and all the shows like Vampire Diaries, True Blood, and other "Paranormal Romance" novels that have popped up after the first book to attempt that, Twilight. Even though that book was as cliché and corny as it got, it was important because it blended two genres that few people though it was possible to blend, and successfully enough to launch an entirely new genre. I have actually written what I would consider to be a "sci-fi romance," and I took great care to keep it within the gray area, not too sci-fi, not too romantic. I plan on publishing this eventually, and I hope that it isn't ignored, because of the potential that it has. Just something to think about.