There may be a "Conversation of Fandom" of some sort going on: for every enthusiastic fan you produce with a work, you must also produce someone who hates it.

I was going to say that the ratio needn't be 1:1, but then I tried googling "easy_install sucks" and "easy_install rocks" and found the same number of hits either way. ;-)

(This is sort of an in-joke for Python programmers: easy_install is an installation tool for Python libraries that I wrote a few years back. It's widely used in the Python open source community, and almost as widely reviled. The hate is mainly inspired by the fact that its use is widespread enough that it's hard for the people who don't like its defaults to avoid any contact with it. If those people could avoid it, they'd probably not bother disliking it much... which seems to support the idea that it's fans that create/support criticism as much as the other way around.)