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A few general points:
1) I do think that a lot of "Harem as the Primary Genre" shows are built around the "Placeholder" concept, yes. In other words, the goal is for the male viewer to feel like he can live vicariously through the male lead. To accomplish this, it helps for the male lead to be very normal, personality-wise. Where I think some harem shows go too far with it is in making the male lead thoroughly unexceptional in an across-the-board way. For some, this is actually immersion breaking because it raises the question of "Why is this guy attracting all these girls"? For the immersion to work, you don't want the male viewer to be asking questions like this. But to be fair, maybe this is less an issue if a show is aimed at a teenaged audience rather than an adult male audience.
2) There's a lot of shows with harem as a secondary genre that benefit from having stand-out strong male protagonists, imo. Kyon from Haruhi. Lelouch from Code Geass. I don't think we should underestimate the positive impact that a strong male lead can have for a show with harem elements. To the degree that VN adaptations are successful, I think this is a big reason why - Clannad's Tomoya and Steins;Gate's Okabe are very good characters in their own right.
3) I think that Archon is largely right about what drives interest and popularity when it comes to K-On! and shows like it. It's been my experience that a lot of harem anime lovers don't like all-girls shows, and a lot of all-girls show lovers don't like harem anime. So I'm inclined to think that these two types of shows have significantly different core appeals.
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