Yes this is true Gruffalo2, peoples posts are, of course influenced by their opinions 
!
My DCs either have/are or will follow the ORT at school. The books are brought home so that they can read to me & DH. The ORT reading scheme serves this purpose well, in that the teachers and us know how they are progressing, and the books complement what is taught in school, so everything ties in nicely.
Surely the idea with additional home reading is to broaden their experiences of reading, though, not to just do more of the same.
I'm not anti ORT at all, I'm just pro giving DCs as wide a range of interesting and well written books as possible. You can achieve that by going to the library and letting them be involved in choosing books that they like the look of, rather than giving them even more ORT. (They do tend to be quite bland, predictable and unimaginative, tbh.)
The parents who go out and buy these books tend to be the types of parents who think that the most important thing about reading is that their DC is on the highest possible colour/stage of the reading scheme.
They are perhaps hoping to fast track their child by whizzing through the colours by doing more of the same at home. I doubt that this fosters a love of reading, though. And these books can't be the most effective at broadening a child's mind/vocabulary/imagination.