Hi Anand,
There is no reason for you to feel sad. As far as I am concerned, you have simply started a discussion. I do not agree that all music is of equal value and that it is all just a matter of personal prefernce, like vanilla ice cream or chocolate ice cream. I believe the comparison is more like, eat a healthy meal or eat a box of arsenic. One supports a healthy life, one brings death.
The problem with "modern music" is the complete abandonment of the language of music that was slowly and carefully built up by western civilization over a period of a thousand years. That is a lot to throw away just for novelty. This stems IMHO from a perverse fetish for "breaking new ground" and believing that the bizarre equates with value.
Schoenberg was among the first and most agressive proponents of atonality. He wrote a few highly chromatic works such as Transfigured Night (1899) that maintined a tenuous grip on tonality and which were fairly well received. But he quickly veered more and more away from the established system of tonality, finally establishing serialism in the 1920's. From the very beginning audiences rejected this complete break with musical language. Thus he and his group began the process of alienating audiences that has led to the current situation. The clash between Stravinsky and Schoenberg is well documented and extremely interesting to study. Basically nothing has changed in the 100 years since. All the arguments are the same now as they were then. People were passionate about the history of music then perhaps far more than now. I firmly side with Stravinsky, despite the fact that in his later years he also experimented with serialism. I can not fault him, since I also, many years ago, have written in the atonal and serial manner.
Schoenberg despised Stravinsky, Ravel and all of the succesful composers who were continuing to write tonal music. Academics gradually accepted Schoenberg's views. After all, it was now possible for a PHD in composition to write music almost everyone hated and still claim everyone else was simply incapable of appreciating their music. Talent, hard work, and quality craftsmanship were no longer required in order to claim to be a composer. I am ashamed to say that it was primarily American universities most guilty of this corruption.
So if we pick say, 1921 as the beginning of complete atonality, it has now been around for 96 years. That is a long time in the history of music. For comparison Beethoven wrote his revolutionary Eroica in 1805 and Dvorak wrote his 9th Symphony in 1893, which is a span of 88 years. Atonality is no longer "new" or the way forward for young composers. Any composer writing atonal music has as much claim on "modernism" as a composer in 1900 writing in the style of Beethoven. Atonality is old.