Yup.
Unfortunately we have the misfortune of having hindsight. It's easy to say you'd still pick her, but the statement of saying you'd still pick her is still influenced by the decisions actually made.
Unfortunately we'll never know, because all of our hypothetical decisions are still affected by the current reality.
By not having Bastila a romance you would take out a lot of the personal emotional investment that, if you just look around the forum, many people apparently had. If we were to take things a bit further, and had KOTOR be a movie where no one would be able to claim that "they" were Revan, then there'd be less emotional attachment still.
I suspect that if the Star Wars movies were actually interactive video games, with Leia and Padme as romance options (or any other character for that matter), they'd score a lot higher because you'd have people that would actually have some emotional attachment to that character.