Well, I've grown quite attached to Romulus and the glimpses we've had of Ki Baratan, the firefalls, the native flora and fauna, etc. "Vulcan's Heart", "Vulcan's Soul", "Taking Wing", "Catalyst of Sorrows" and episodes like "Unification" and "Inter Arma..." all made good use of the setting for at least part of the story. I think locations are as important to the stories as character, and I'm not fond of their sudden destruction for no particular reason. It's true that story-telling potential has certainly not been damaged by the loss of Romulus (it may in fact have grown, and I trust the authors to make good use of the opportunities), but it's a shame to invest in a location, explore it, set multiple stories or parts of there, only for it to then be totally wiped off the map.
As several others have said, there's no reason to treat Romulus as a location that will never be seen again. There's still plenty of room left for stories set in the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th centuries. The tales of the Earth-Romulan War that begin with next year's
Beneath the Raptor's Wing will most likely spend a lot of time on 22nd-century Romulus. And there will still be five or six years' worth (in-universe) of stories to tell about Romulus in the Typhon Pact era. John Byrne has been doing a whole series of IDW comics about the Romulans in the timeframe of TOS, and
Vanguard could potentially cover that as well. So there's no reason to assume that stories set on Romulus have to come to an end anytime soon. ST literature is free to explore the entire sweep of ST history.
It's not destruction that's the problem, it's simply that, unfortunately and as a result of this unavoidable collision of canon and novels (which the novels must, of course, give way on) the destruction of Romulus has no real meaning to the ongoing story. The devastation on Cardassia had meaning, as it was a natural outcome of the path that world and the galaxy as a whole had taken, sad as the outcome was. The loss of the worlds in the "Destiny" trilogy also had meaning, as again this was a logical outcome of the path the Federation and Borg had been on from their first contact.... However, while the loss of Romulus logically motivates this destruction of Vulcan and so (again, to be fair) has meaning for that new timeline, what meaning does it have in the Prime timeline?
How much "meaning" did Hurricane Katrina have to the history of New Orleans? It wasn't some dramatically significant outgrowth of previous events in the city's life; it was an arbitrary natural disaster. Destruction is frequently meaningless. The meaning lies in how people deal with its consequences, and what it exposes about the strengths and weaknesses of the society forced to cope with it.
Arguably nothing in life has an intrinsic meaning, because meaning is a consequence of perception and thought. Things only mean something
to the people who observe and experience them. So the meaning of an event is something that is constructed in its wake, not something that precedes it.
Many times over the years, the screen canon has thrown things at us that we didn't expect. And the books have adapted and found ways to explore the meaning of those events, often in far more depth than the shows or films could.
I acknowledge that I really should wait to see what the novels "do" with the destruction of Romulus. As you say, the event will take on meaning to the ongoing story in the aftermath, as the characters evaluate or cope with what happened. The "problem", which I'm aware isn't really a problem at all but simply my biases, is just that until an event in a fictional universe has meaning to the wider story it leaves me a little...lost. As you say, not everything can be an outgrowth of prior events; some things are completely arbitrary and random. I'll probably be just fine with the loss of Romulus once the aftermath of that event has been explored 
+ 
