Finley Quaye did have a double platinum album though, was loved by the music press and won a Brit Award. Your perception of who was big would be different depending on whether you were a 12 year old teenybopper or a 25 year old NME-reading gig-goer.
I'd agree that they didn't always get the balance right in some of those 90s shows, but you can't really dismiss artists like them as irrelevant, and their approach to putting the programmes together would be taking into account the target audience would've been slightly older viewers who'd been watching the TOTP repeats since '76 (and yes, with a sprinkling of snobbery, too).