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Sometimes too many sub-genres can turn you away from something you might like. Case in point for me. When I originally saw the genre "Urban Fantasy" I didn't know what it was. I knew I felt more comfortable in the rural or suburburban areas rather than the urban ones - using the traditional understanding of these words. And fantasy is something I sometimes like a little bit, and other times avoid. So I stayed away from "Urban Fantasy" because it just didn't sound appealing. Then for some unknown reason, I read Jim Butcher's first Dresden Files book. And I really liked it. Will I like other authors take on Urban Fantasy? That, I can't say. But I can say that I was initially repelled from the genre just by it's chosen sub-classification name, and not knowing what that meant.
So it works both ways. Too many oddly named sub-genres can be a turn off as well as an invitation. Had I been asked how to describe Jim Butcher's work, I would have called it something like "Crime/Mystery, with a magical twist". "Urban Fantasy" seems like an artificial jumble of unrelated words to me. An attempt to distinguish the genre as something different from all the rest, but doing so in a relatively meaningless way. Basically, it is just plain old Crime/Mystery. With a twist of the occult added. It's not really a "new genre" IMHO.
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