To my mind, the hypersaturation of colors in digital photography is the same as the loudness wars on CDs (which ironically loses one of the great benefits of CD, the huge dynamic range which is now effectively unused outside of few jazz and classical recordings), and the televisions/monitor defaults that emphasize red and high contrast.

Consider, too, with CCD and the lens systems, there are shifts toward certain hues, and further post-processing (e.g. photoshop) is used to distort the color balance.

Of course they probably said the same about Kodachrome's vibrant, but unnatural colors "back when..."

But why? It's done, because we can. And it's noticeably different. And it's sometimes not a matter of being better, just different, since in a saturated world of media (no pun intended) differentiating one's work from the millions of others is often enough of a deciding factor to trigger a choice. Which brings me to the topic of the fashion industry...

There are usually a bunch of color profiles you can set to control the colors. He defaults are too “vivid”. High end cameras can shoot “raw” images and have more control over color as you need software to “develop” the raw into a more useful format(jpg/tiff...)