[J.R.]

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Is this award less controversial and less based on popularity than others, like the gold gloves?

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Yes. In addition to the "less important" reason already mentioned, offensive is more easily distilled into statistical representations of value that are commonly dispersed and accepted. For example, OPS, while far from perfect, is fairly accurate and widely accepted, especially when one tries to identify a comparable defensive statistic.

Defensive measures of value are far less developed than offensive stats and also far less dispersed. Even the more advanced defensive measures sometimes substantially disagree, ala andruw jones, carl crawford, etc. (mostly because of the surprising large differences between the PBP data supplied by Stats and BIS).

Basically, its a lot easier to know who is good offensively than it is to know who is good defensively because of commonly available measures of value. The more asymmetrical the distribution of high quality information about a topic, the greater the divergence of opinions about the subject.