TL;DR: I have an unpainted army, and there are good reasons. Jim is trolling, I'm feeding him, and I don't even care.
If your models arent painted you are either lazy or cant afford the hobby. As jokerr has stated, if you cant find the time or the money, or are lazy, go play magic. It is a good game. Once again. not trolling lol.
Jim, I agree that it's sometimes disheartening to play against armies that are unpainted. That said, I think that your statement that this equates directly to being lazy and/or unable to afford the hobby is absurd, and paints the community in too broad of strokes. As an example, I am starting a brand new army. I built the army pretty quickly, and am working on painting it.
BUT I'm not the kind of painter to just slap 3 colors on a model and call it done, even for my opponent's sake. I methodically develop and test painting techniques on a handful of test models so that I can get my color mixtures and set of techniques down pat before my paint ever touches a model in the army. That way, I can be sure that I'm getting what I want out of my army. Second, I paint somewhat slowly. This is for two reasons, neither of which is laziness or inability to afford paint. I have limited hobby time. This is because my free time (which is fairly scarce as is) is split between 3 activities roughly equally. One is volunteering for a hospital, a cause I care much about, the other is mentoring robotics teams at the high school, college, and graduate levels, which I also care a lot about. To say that I'm lazy is to discount these other activities as irrelevant, which I don't appreciate. Finally, my army
WILL be fully painted, and hopefully beautifully so, it's just going to take time. I'm shooting for June. I'm allowed to hobby at my own pace.
You can TRY to justify it to yourselves but there really isnt anything else to this conversation. Either take pride in the hobby or go play another one.
I don't have to justify anything. My army is unpainted. I take an immense amount of pride in this hobby, and I'm not going to slap 3 colors on my models to fulfill some bullshit standard. I'm going to paint them at the speed that makes
my models look how
I want them. It's this kind of trolling bullshit that's getting you flak from the community.