Are you telling me that 90% of people who actively sought out and installed an ad blocker did not take the time to click twice more and disable the whitelist?
I'd wager that most ABP users who have the whitelist enabled do so for ideological reasons, not laziness.
ABP conducted some sort of ad hoc survey about this [2011]; they write about the results at the bottom of the FAQ list: https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads under the question "Do Adblock Plus users really want this feature?"
Supposedly 25% of ABP users were found to be strictly against all ads; 75% are okay with some ads to support websites.
Therefore, arguably, the whitelist feature serves the users who are in this 75% who don't want a blocker to block everything, making the browser extension useful/acceptable to more people.
Are you telling me that 90% of people who actively sought out and installed an ad blocker did not take the time to click twice more and disable the whitelist?
I'd wager that most ABP users who have the whitelist enabled do so for ideological reasons, not laziness.