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I don't this question is generally addressable without discussing your meta-ethical views.
If welfare is good because (and only because) we as individuals care about our welfare (call this Premise C) then things being good requires actual people (whether past/present/future) to exist in the first place - otherwise there is no source of value, and no basis on which to judge what is good and what is not.
Note that this isn't necessarily constructivism, insofar as you will have something like "X is …
One challenge to Premise C is the temporary depressive. Suppose Adam doesn't care about his welfare, and is considering suicide. He also has access to a 100% reliable antidepressant pill. If he takes the pill, he will have a very happy future (which he would, at that future time, highly value). But right now, he doesn't value that at all. So he commits suicide instead. Did Adam make a mistake? I think yes: he should've taken the pill and had a happy future instead. C implies no.
For furthe…
The Adam case works as an intuition pump, but it falls short of being an argument. For someone inclined to accept C, it's pretty easy to accept that Adam didn't make a mistake.
On the moral realism thing — it may be true that your normative claims can be separated from your moral realism, but your writing style is so pervaded by realist turns of phrase that it's easy to see why people keep picking up on that and assuming that your realism is central to your argument. For example:
>"it’s insane t…
Hmm, I think it would be difficult to do normative ethics in a way that didn't sound at least superficially "realist". That's part of why anti-realists like Blackburn and Gibbard have put so much work into showing that their metaethics is compatible with "talking like a realist". So I think I'd rather just urge anti-realist readers to shed their unnecessary suspicion of objectively-tinged moral discourse.
I guess what strikes me as objectionable is the conjunction of realism with the sort of strong confidence in your own normative views (and dismissal of other views) that you express in this post.
Suppose I find myself in in the following situation:
(1) I believe there is a true, objectively correct axiology.
(2) I sometimes encounter otherwise reasonable-seeming people who have thought carefully about the relevant issues and concluded that there is no strong reason to prefer utopia over the barren rock.
(3) I am unable to imagine that the correct axiology could be indifferent between the barren rock and utopia, but also unable to offer any arguments supporting my own view.
What is the appropriate attitude to adopt in such a situation? I don't think there is anything wrong with saying "I am just going to take it as a premise that utopia is substantially better than the barren rock." This is just like assuming the parallel postulate and studying Euclidean rather than non-Euclidean geometry. But if I can't imagine how the parallel postulate could possibly be false, this does not justify me in calling non-Euclidean geometry "insane" or assuming I possess a fundamental insight into mathematical truth that non-Euclidean geometers lack; rather, I should take it as an opportunity to reflect on the limitations of my own geometric imagination.
The precise relevance of (1) here is a little difficult to pin down, but perhaps it is something like this: without something like (1), I would not be tempted to call the other views crazy, any more than I would be tempted to call someone crazy for thinking that tea tastes better than coffee. And if I do say "the claim that tea tastes better than coffee is insane, and any theory of hot beverages that implies this claim should be instantly disqualified," it would seem disingenuous, when encountering someone who objects that hot beverage preferences are a matter of personal taste, for me to urge them drop their needless suspicion of objectively tinged hot beverage discourse, since they can just interpret my claims merely as an expression of my own strong preference for coffee — that clearly wasn't what I thought I was saying (or doing) when I made the claim.