Apart from its rhetorical value, the allegory is interesting because of it raises questions concerning life-as-suffering and painful knowledge/blissful ignorance. The Matrix does a decent job of relaying both of those concepts to a mass audience.
Personally, I'm not certain that humans can create a meaningful utopia. Empirically, we seem to be very bad at personally gauging our absolute welfares[1].
My issue with it is that it takes certain stances on those questions and then tries to answer them. I would prefer for the audience to be a bit more critical of those answers.
The Hedonic Treadmill for me gets about the same treatment as Maslov's Hierarchy of Needs - it's too simplistic and the conclusions it makes are biased by the beliefs of the culture it originated in. It's fairly easy to find many questions to ask and many holes to poke. A lot of "happiness" studies sadly tend to tap directly into cultural norms and expectations and are very difficult to untangle. Including the cultural norm of giving "happiness" a high value, higher than the painful knowledge you mention, for instance. One objective I would have for a utopia is that knowledge would cease to be painful. Until then, it's a lie either way, and a true utopia is not a lie.
Not to mention, if the Hedonic Treadmill is true, it's highly likely to be genetic, which is should not be an obstacle give or take a few centuries.
I would recommend against throwing out the utopian idea based on social science theories. The Hedonic Treadmill is maybe 40 years old, utopias are probably many k years in the future.
Uncontacted native tribes emerge naked and starving from the woods. The males hunt and kill, and the women stick to domestic tasks. They like clothes, they like shoes, and they like shelter. Their behaviors and expectations are hardly that removed from ours. There is nothing wrong with subscribing to long running historical norms until they no longer satisfy you or are otherwise proven harmful.
