Your first paragraph rings true to me: the complaints I've heard are basically those you mentioned.

My friends are mostly fairly contrarian late-twenties male engineering, computing science and math people. I think that apart from not enjoying Methods, they're pretty much the usual LW demographic. That's part of the reason I was surprised when they didn't like Methods. There are lots of possible reasons for this (to me) surprising result. Maybe they thought I didn't like it, and wanted to mirror that back. Maybe they're a group already biased against LW. Maybe they actually just dislike the writing style. Who knows? If they don't enjoy Eliezer's writing style, then maybe LW is not a good place for them to hang out, so it doesn't matter that it didn't work as advertising on them.

Do you think that LW doesn't need other methods of marketing?