a couple of Justin Kay snips followed by > my comments.. 
As Randy mentioned, he cares not of color alone. I care not of color alone
(they could be black, grey, or purple for all I care, I don't even notice
most of the time). I don't know anyone else who cares about the color of
their queens absent honey yields, disease resistance, brood buildup . . .

>I don't think Randy is (do correct me if I am wrong here) a major commercial supplier of queens.  Just because he does not look at queens color (personally I do but more in terms of the ratio in the color of workers vs drones) does not mean other do not.

Where is this hypothetical mass of customers who want golden queens, but
actively fail to care if they produce good offspring otherwise?

>Having done a bit of consulting work for a large well know and often vilified corporation just about any large operation who uses lots of hired labor and relies on about half their income in the form of pollination fees will lean on these attributes as well as very early and heavy brooding capacity of the queen they buy. < see comments on Mr Mraz below...

Interesting. Can you share the source Pete? If there's more, I'd love to
read the rest.

> Mr Mraz use to write a regular column for the ABJ way back when... I can recall one article where he declared that the kind of queens described above were not the kind the average beekeeper should want... basically his rational was that bees that brood up heavy and early also tended to starve long before winter was done.. ps... get yourself a large stack of old ABJ and do read what Mr Mraz had to say... likely just as important advice now as it was then.

Between last summer and this spring something went terribly wrong though,
and the vast majority of my hives turned incredibly vicious. Gloves became
mandatory (which I despise). They became a threat to neighbors and my young
daughter. A few were more aggressive than the rest, but once the pheromones
are in the air in a yard, even a normal hive will turn defensive.

>And what exactly was the lesson you learned?  I would suggest any group of bees can turn pretty mean for a long list of reasons. Quite often you can do things to minimize this sort of problem which may or may not have something to do with breeding. In similar situations here (Central Texas) the primary cause are too many hives on too small of a lot, starvation or queens failing for any number of reason (yes including heavy varroa infestation rates) and predation (skunks, raccoons or small hive beetles).  Also not to be overlooked is how and when beekeepers do manipulation...

Gene a bit south of San Francisco Bay...

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