It's a good distinction. A similar sort of thing turned up in my free will ("Action and Responsibility") class: when polling the general population, philosophers found that people give inconsistent accounts of responsibility when an act is good versus evil. (The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill has a famous experimental philosophy department (http://www.unc.edu/~knobe/ExperimentalPhilosophy.html) - the case I'm thinking of is here (http://www.unc.edu/~knobe/side-effects.html).) The thing is, people like to consider these words as automatically loaded - if someone is a "painter", that's a good thing regardless of how terrible the paintings may be.

Of course, the really weird thing is that almost no-one actually comes out and explicitly argues for the emotional interpretation - they just choose to use the words that way. The only real exception I can think of is the Phaedrus-Pirsig of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, with respect to Quality.