Nobody complains about the false sense of agency created through the avoidance of the passive voice. It is a cheap literary trick (though an effective one if used judiciously) to re-cast a static description to make it seem as though the object in the description were engaged in some activity, not just sitting there being described:

"The mountains rose abruptly from the rolling plains; dense groves of pine covered them, leaving only miniscule clearings that offered respite to bone-tired travelers..."

That kind of thing. (I ought to put that in my list of 1001 novelistic clichés!) In scholarly writing I find myself performing an analogous manoeuver once in a while. The defamiliarization the results from a reversal of perspective can be effective, though it can be distracting too (if overdone).

Imagine a description of a poet's accomplishments. She was educated at Yale; she was awarded this prize and that. She studied with blank and blank. If you recast everything to the active voice, you might lose focus on the poet: Knopf published her; Jorie Graham taught her... etc... The American Academy of poets showered prizes on her. What you really should be aiming for is a smoothly modulated effect, combining some intransitive verbs, some passives, and some transitive verbs in the active voice.

To follow up a comment by the inestimable Thomas Basbxll, the notion that "only those who teach freshman comp should be allowed to offer style advice" is, in my view, exactly the opposite from the way we ought to be thinking about such matters. Since those teachers see the worst writing, they might develop a distorted perspective. (Wouldn't teaching fourth-graders to play the clarinet lead one to a distorted idea about musical phrasing? Anything but THAT! You would say.) You see only the photographic negative of good style.