I'll take the psychological perspective and say that it's probably because gamers have sniffed out 'procedurally generated' as an industry hype term that is both wildly inaccurate and often downright incorrect. Procedural generation is a buzzword used as often as 'dynamic lighting', 'instinctive AI that learns from your moves', and 'non-linear gameplay and story paths.' These terms start on marketing papers and end up coming out of the mouths of software developers.

Or perhaps more likely the other way around.

I doubt any of these indie devs have marketing depts

Procedural generation for a completely story oriented video game..that was actually an interesting idea, at least to experiment. There could be an achievement that requires you to complete all possible stories or perhaps one that changes as people acquire it:
You are currently the only one with this story

Yes, especially a lot of game developers think so. Procedural generation well done can lead to a high replayability factor. But more often than not this is just a marketing term for "We skimped on level design and just use a random generator". In those cases the random generation achieves the opposite of what was originally intended and instead of keeping the game interesting for a long time, the game feels repetetive and unimaginative after a short while. Because it is.

You say that like it's a bad thing. Nerds make the games, nerds play the games. Let the nerds pitch the games.

I don't.

Sure they do, it's just that the marketing department is the same team as the audio department which is the same team as the programming department which is the same team as the graphics department which consists of the visual effects team, the user interface team, the animation team, the aesthetic team, and the modeling team, all of which are the same as the founder and only person in the "company".

This is nothing new. In the late 90s, "random-generated levels" were all the rage. Everyone had random-generated levels. From confusing mazes to levels that didn't make any sense, random levels starting going out of vogue.

At their best, you had games like Diablo with a spectacular core game using random levels to give players unexpected challenges with their friends and on their own. The game had so much diversity that it didn't feel very repetitive.

But at their worst, both indie and big-publishers were laying down dull mechanics and supporting long play-times with boring, non-nonsensical random levels. Some games were simply a large grid of rooms with 4 walls with random doors appearing in N, S, W or E. The doors formed a maze. In the exact middle of each room was a bad guy or collection of bad guys, selected randomly. And you would assault these creatures with some basic button mashing or clicking.

People grew tired of this.

Morrowind was the first game I'd heard of that boasted a giant "hand-crafted" world. People were longing to get away from random generation and actually play a full, large-scale game that took hours to explore that had meaningful item and object placement, meaningful equipment and meaningful NPC interactions. Morrowind gave this to everyone.

Today, we have "Procedurally generated" games. Like before, we have great games with great core mechanics that use procedural generation. But like before, we also are being inundated with terrible games with boring levels and lousy core gameplay.

People are good at pattern-recognition. Many people have been burned so many times by procedurally generated games that they now understand that "procedurally generated" is a key-word to stay away. They may be missing out on some great games, but they don't care. That's just where they're at.

For the most part, I stay away from random-generated levels and procedurally-generated levels. I like hand-crafted content more. But there are many games I still love that are random/procedurally generated (Diablo and Rogue Legacy are good examples).

So for them, it's a bit of 'once bitten, twice shy'. Instead of marketing hype like some graphics crap, PG can have negative effects based on their particular gameplay tastes. And having been burned a time or two, it's something they stay away from (initially, anyway) without knowing how deep the PG elements run.

I can understand that, though I hope they give an otherwise-promising title a second chance through gameplay videos and the like.

That's what they definitely should do also because "procedurally generated" doesn't really say much on its own. You need to know which things were procedurally generated and how and see some reviews of it or try yourself to really judge if it is a good thing for this game.

Without any further additional explanation it is not much more than a catch phrase used to somehow give the game a positive vibe and this doesn't work on everyone and may even backfire.

I remember trying to come up with a scheme for something like that for fan-fiction 15 years ago. Although it could give an overall say of what was going on and even generate details, I wasn't sure how to make it flow like it was written by a person and not 'Person A picked up object X, Person B noticed Person A get object X, Person A fights Person B' etc etc. Although it could get complete a complete story smaller more natural and filler details would be lacking, requiring a lot of little addins and rules that wouldn't give very good long term stories.

I don't really recall developers/publishers using the term this way in the marketing material. All cases I recall refer to either procedurally generated levels and/or randomized loot/equipment.
From what I understand Blade Runner and The Last Express kinda work this way (I haven't played either one yet, though).
Although Rogue Legacy uses only manually created rooms and positions them at random and you recognize the rooms VERY soon, much more quickly than you recognize the patterns in Diablo.

I'm just thinking: In traditional RPGs you have a story master, a story system, a setting, rules, stats, ... and what one could do is maybe partly take over the work of the story master while leaving enough control to all the person. Kind of like a co-op story writing where several people and the programm all write the story together and decide together what happens. Could be fun.

Sounds like an RP... Or more a multiple choice stories where the paths can diverge quite radically. They were somewhat common as i recall a while back. Easier to do using only SQL or database configuration vs a filesystem or something.