If you post your fic at a forum, at least if it's a relatively active one, it is likely that you'll get a stream of people telling you to describe more unless you describe amazingly well already. I've also found that when something has a bad plot, not a very solid writing style, and especially bad spelling and grammar, people will demand more description than if you are strong in these aspects. It sometimes seems to me that some people will simply read the fic, and if they like it, they say everything is fine (except for perhaps some minor things), but if they don't like it, they're very likely to decide that lack of description is to blame. Not that people don't comment on the plot and stuff too, but description is something that people almost always comment on if the fic is sub-par overall. Basically, many people seem to think of description as an incredibly important thing. I disagree. Why?
I've heard fiction being compared to video games, and I like that comparison. Pretty much every aspect of writing has a counterpart in video games. Plot, length, overall appreciation. Description is the counterpart of graphics.
There are graphic-freaks out there. They won't buy a game if the graphics are bad, and they will buy a game with good graphics, irrelevant of the rest. But they are a minority. Most people prefer the gameplay by far. Most Pok?mon fans will agree that Red and Blue were great games, even though the graphics were horrible. The Pok?mon games' graphics are overall sub-par, but we don't really care that much, do we? Nope. It's the amazing addictive effect that Pok?mon has on us.
Now, people have different systems, and on the slower ones, too detailed graphics can slow the game down, making it just plain irritating to play, or even prevent the game from working on the system at all. The very fastest will sometimes refuse to play old games (with bad graphics), too. People have a "system" built in them; it's their sensitivity to overdescription and underdescription. And it's not the people's own fault if they're sensitive to over- or underdescription, so saying "they should have updated long ago" won't save you from the fact that some people simply cannot read overdescribed text. That includes me. Description that's one word too long will be very unattractive to me.
Basically, description should be handled with care, and always balanced so that as many people as possible can read it without it getting lengthy or slow.
