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Unpopular anime opinions.

People need to stop taking their own rating system way too seriously. I have seen people who are scared to rate things too low or too high because they didn't want people to criticize their taste. I rate things honestly based on how I feel about the anime title. I give Angel Cop an 8/10 because it's a fun title. I don't care if it's not high art, I enjoy for what it is. Don't be scared to rate something like Future Diary low because you didn't like or don't be scared to rate something like Mad Bull 34 high because you had a good time watching it.

I do the same for movies as well. I give both The Toxic Avenger and Casablanca a 9/10 on Letterboxd. Does that mean I think The Toxic Avenger is equally good as Casablanca? No, I enjoy them for different reasons. If I was a serious critic, maybe I would rate things differently. However, I'm not. Even if I was a paid critic, I won't sell out because that's not who I am.

@Top Gun

I'm going to have to agree with you on this. Assigning a number to a subjective opinion and then manipulating the numbers assigned as if they were objective truth simply gives a spurious sense of accuracy. It then feeds into arguments as to which show is better.

I feel the same way about top 10 lists (or top 50 etc.) In what way is it practical to rate a romantic comedy against an action/adventure show and decide which is better??

My rating system is 4-step system based on what guttural sound I make when I think about a show. "Oh, no, this show rated a 'ugh,' which is worse than last week's 'meh'." It may not be the most useful for communicating with others.

Speaking of Future Dairy, I'm not a big fan of it....

And by episode 12, the anime goes into politics in the most absurd Cold War era fearmongering, right-wing/anti-"commie"/Trumpesque propaganda spoiler[about orphan children being undergoing some experiments in the "Eastern block" even though nothing like that happened while experiments on children were actually documented to happen in the USA and Canada.]

PRAGUE — Czech police have arrested four people, including two Americans, on charges of physically abusing and imprisoning American youths at an unlicensed reform school for wayward teenagers.

The school, Moravia Academy, reportedly opened earlier this year in a secluded hotel about 200 kilometers (120 miles) from Prague...
...
The teacher said that the students were also forbidden to leave the grounds, which are protected by guard dogs. The newspaper said the youths' days were programmed from 6:30 A.M. to 9:30 P.M. and that they were forced to "sing positive songs, read positive books and were subjected to 30 minutes of psychological pressure from tape recordings."

Elven Lied is a hodgepodge of wasted interesting ideas and psychological themes, instead exchanged for shock gore and fan service.
Wolf's Rain is a beautiful, complex gem with many great themes on the nature of survival, love, and corruption. For all its corniness, the shows overall quality makes up for it in dividends.

Sorry if I'm changing the subject a bit, just didn't really have anything to contribute to the conversation behind me.

Even more unpopular opinion: I have never seen any point in numerically rating titles, as they're reductionist to the point of being essentially useless. I like so many different shows for so many different reasons that I could never hope to directly compare them via something as limiting as a single number. Am I ranking them based on how much I personally enjoyed them? On how well-made I think they were? On some hopeless standard of "objective" quality? I can't answer that, so I don't bother. I've had a MAL account for almost 15 years, and in all that time I've kept the ratings column disabled, because I just about never use it. (I can count the titles I've rated on one hand, and most of those were among the direst garbage OVAs ever made and earned that 1.) If people ask me what I liked or disliked about a particular title, I'm usually happy to talk their ears off about it, especially if it falls toward one of the two poles. But I'm not willing to plop mostly-arbitrary numbers on them in a vain attempt to rank them against each other.

(Seriously though, every time I see people in the comments thread of an ANN review having a heated debate about the merits of a single letter grade at the bottom, instead of the few thousand-word-long review that preceded it, I die a little more inside.)

it hasn't stopped, it's just not nearly as intrusive. Its also a show by show basis, since some wouldn't benefit in any way from creative liberties.