Is that really an issue still today? It's been decades since someone has questioned that I play with a pick, these days it's more "oh, you play with a pick, nice!". Lots of drummers and guitarists seem to like it because they can locate it better even if the music is loud.
Like most pick players from my generation, my choice for it came out of sheer necessity. Until several years into bass playing, I simply never had a rig that could have projected finger playing as audibly as playing bass with a pick (with the treble cranked up high - something I have stopped doing these days). By that time, I was too impatient to relearn playing with fingers. That a lot of my role models (Glenn Hughes, Roger Glover, Nick Simper, Jim Lea, Martin Turner, Alan Lancaster, Gene Simmons, Macca) all played with a pick (for probably the same reason: getting heard!) probably had something to do with it too.
I still hold though that finger playing - with all its micro-inaccuracies and varying emphasis on notes - sounds more human and invites more inventive and intricate rhythmic playing than pick playing. There are rhythmic subtleties in finger playing that you just don't come up with as a (solely) pick player. Pick playing, otoh, is more attention-grabbing, assertive and your melodies cut through better. Perhaps it also leads you to more melodically adventurous playing simply because you are not so focused on your right hand.
These days, what a right hand bassist does with his left (fretting hand) is in any case more important to me than how he hits the strings. The only thing I don't really like that much is that Rocco Prestia-style ultra-fast-sixteen-notes-finger-playing which to me sounds simply nervous and rhythmically overly busy without setting real rhythmic signposts as you would if you played the same run in quarters or eights. Give me Bernard Edwards in comparison anytime. There I said it. But of course he has (both have/had) immaculate technique.