If you're sending a camera from here to another planet, it makes no sense to send a camera that takes pictures in the same wavelengths that we see so you can claim true color. Instead you pick wavelengths that for whatever scientific reasons you think will be most informative.
And then once you have that information, for humans to understand it, it makes no sense to leave it as raw binary data. Instead you map some of the wavelengths that you've got onto wavelengths that our eyes can see, and trained human eyes can identify and understand features very quickly. But at that point you've got a false color picture.
"Images with red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural-color view, which is what the human eye would see if we were there at Saturn."
I don't think anyone's disputing that false color could be useful to scientists or that we should put cameras on satellites that capture true color images for the benefit of blog posts targeting the general public, and I certainly was not claiming anything like that, being horribly under-qualified. But waxing poetic about "the red rose of Saturn" is a little bit silly IMHO, but it's nothing worse than that...
A big part of science is the dog and pony show to bring in even more funding down the road. Throw in the public funding of NASA and you see the need to publish these fantastic images - to justify a budget. And it works.
