Yeah there are definitely good and bad HOAs. I work for a home builder and in the last couple of years we've worked on a lot of projects that were started before the the market collapsed so we deal with a lot of HOAs. There are some that are great, easy to work with, and completely reasonable and there are some that are hell to work with.
We bought the remaining units in an unfinished condo complex and the person we bought them from ended up having to sue the HOA because they couldn't get them to respond to numerous requests for information and paperwork to complete the sale.
We had another that was single family houses but you owned your patio and house and the rest of the lot was owned by the HOA which means they were responsible for all upkeep on landscaping and stuff like that and they're were doing a horrible job at it. Everything that wasn't dead was overgrown, sprinkler systems broken, etc. About 3/4 of the homeowners got together and stopped paying their dues and it turned into a big fight that we got caught in the middle of. In the end it turned out the president's cousin or something like that started a landscaping company for nothing other than doing the work in the neighborhood and convinced the board to give them the contract and was taking kickbacks or something.
Then we've had others that have been great. Done everything they can to help us finish out the project. We've had several that compromised with us on certain aesthetic things like comp vs tile roofs, stone exteriors, etc that help us keep costs down. Most of them are pretty excited to have the neighborhood complete instead of having 20-50 empty lots sitting around collecting weeds.
One of the biggest problems is like LandOfTheLostPass said that a lot of people don't want to or don't have the time to be involved and it ends up falling to the meddling old lady that lives down the street and has nothing else to do but stick their nose in everything everyone else is doing.
I'm ok with the concept of HOAs but usually it just turns into you slowly losing more and more control of what you do on your property.
I currently live in a neighborhood where half was built in the 60's and no homeowners association was formed at the time. The other half was built in the mid 90's and they wanted to form an HOA but couldn't convince enough of the old neighborhood to join so we ended up with a voluntary HOA. The dues are something like fifty dollars a year which mostly covers snacks at the meetings. They don't have any real power but they've set up recommended color schemes and stuff like that as just kinda of a "Hey it would be cool if you could not paint your house bright pink". The usually organize a bbq or two every summer. There's a main street a few miles long that comes into the neighborhood and there's nothing on it so a couple times a year they buy drinks and snacks and ask people to volunteer to walk along it and pick up trash. They do keep on eye on the neighborhood and will give people notices if their yard gets messy or something and ask them to clean it but there's no fines or anything. A couple times we found out that their yards or whatever were messy because they were elderly or sick and just couldn't do it so the HOA asked for volunteers and we went and cleaned it up for them.
Well that turned into a book. lol. Anyway, yeah they go both ways.