I am mildly fantasted by the notion that you would have tasted artificially berry-flavored candies earlier in life than the actual berries they were meant to mimic, and thus been biased by candy flavors against actual fruit. That's completely bizarre to me. I agree that what American manufacturers consider cherry-flavor is profoundly dire. Worse even than "grape" flavor. But as someone who grew up first in small-town Sweden, I had cherries, raspberries, gooseberries, strawberries, alpine strawberries, and all sorts of more "exotic" berries out of the garden well before I ever tasted the American versions of artificial candy flavors, or indeed the Swedish ones. It may be worth noting that the various fruit and berry flavors you find in Swedish candies are completely different from what you find in the US, and in my view, much nicer. My experience of the American flavor spectrum in cheap confisserie was generally traumatic when we moved to the US. Most of the new flavors were chalky, medicinal, and just nasty. So maybe it's not that you don't like red candy more broadly, just the US versions...