It was supposed to be. 
It was a good meditation on identity in the digital era. Sort of like a watered-down, less wordy GITS.
If you want shclock and action, SAO is that way. 
I don't want SAO, that looks even worse. SIGN was just hyped as fuck when it came out, then it was an incredibly slow burn that bored me to death.
I guess I was pretty divorced from the hype. It just looked like a cool show on Cartoon Network which then got bumped to midnight for its final episodes with no warning.
I still don't really get the hate for SAO when theres so much other trash out there. I guess it helps that I rarely watch modern anime that tropey bullshit didn't really affect me.
SAO irks me on a few levels.
- Nothing about the world or its rules makes sense if you think about it for more than two seconds.
- Main character is a dumb Gary Stu author-insert character with nothing interesting about him. He gets a busty tsundere to fall in his lap and then has to rescue for contrived reasons.
- It's stupidly popular (far above .hack) for the above reason.
- The main villain is just... lmao.
- Annoying Navi-like loli character is introduced halfway calling the MC "daddy" approximately 100 times an episode.
- Overwrought, overly-dramatic, and pointless cousin incest subplot.
- There's a couple standalone episodes that don't make any sense or are soooooo overdramatic as to be laughable (the Christmas one.)
- In fact there's just a lot of bad writing overall. There's one ep where the MC takes a bunch of underleveled chars into a super high level zone then acts SUPER surprised when they're all killed around him.
- As a .hack fan, I was excited to see a new-age high-budget MMO anime, making all of the above even worse.
Never watched s2, it may be an improvement, but IMO the whole franchise is a dumpster fire. I've never met someone who was a big fan of it who wasn't also an annoying creep.
