I am just saying that the glass is half empty, and you are saying it's half full.

I'm saying that the half that's empty gives it certain merits (while also giving it certain drawbacks)

Was I supposed to care about Yui's struggle? I really didn't.

You can or you can't, that's just your part in the show.

We went straight from Yui the trouble-causing prankster to Yui the super sad cripple who is apparently in love with Hinata. Multiple steps were very obviously condensed in this story arc, to the point that it just doesn't make sense.

I guess I saw her differently each step of the way. An attention seeking go-getter, irritating to those around her, who underneath is trying to live life to the fullest because she had barely a life before she died. I don't think she was ever in love with Hinata until he proposed to her - then she was overwhelmed by his generosity in being willing to give his life to her, even if she can hardly give much of a life to him, and that feeling was enough to move her onward. It all made sense to me.

That's not the only way of looking at her, but it was mine and a number of my friends'. She's a good example of how the show can greatly vary in effect just from how you connect to small parts of the cast; each of the other issues you have I saw very differently as I watched, but I can understand why someone can see them negatively - expect for the Otonashi and Kanade romance. It's impossible for that not to happen. She literally has his heart.

The entire thing was so ham-fisted and awkward that I couldn't buy it.

There are a lot of caricatures of things done that way on purpose. It's harder, I think, to connect with the longer you've been into anime. But a lot of different artists have had their work stifled by the popular medium they're in.

I don't really understand this sentence at all. In what way is it unfair for people to call out a popular show's weaknesses?

I don't think people consider the entirety of the show often; they leave out the omissions of their criticism, when those are important parts of the way Maeda does anime. I am talking about misinterpreted artistic choices. In fact, I'm talking about artistic choices that seem to barely get interpreted at all.

It's not unfair that they criticise things, as I spoke of above; it's unfair that there seems to be a norm that few anime fans will properly evaluate the absence of something. I also think pulling an anime back for not being what it never could have been is unfair. If it doesn't do a good job for you, fine - but that doesn't mean it'll immediately do a better job if it was longer. Hence the argument in the essay I linked to.