I don't know if it's a niche thing. A lot of the reaction in the game community, from various people involved in translation project, seems to be that
the Atlus solution is generally accepted as the best one for the specific case of P3, which is rare. Very few games that come out of Japan were as
'immersed' in Japan as P3 was. The game was set in Japan, at a Japanese high school, with Japanese students, who went to said school at a Japanese
schedule, with Japanese holidays. The keeping of the honorifics, which were limited to -kun, -chan, -sempai, and -san (and the dialectal variant -tan), helped
to maintain the air of living in Japan.
the Atlus solution is generally accepted as the best one for the specific case of P3, which is rare. Very few games that come out of Japan were as
'immersed' in Japan as P3 was. The game was set in Japan, at a Japanese high school, with Japanese students, who went to said school at a Japanese
schedule, with Japanese holidays. The keeping of the honorifics, which were limited to -kun, -chan, -sempai, and -san (and the dialectal variant -tan), helped
to maintain the air of living in Japan.