A lot of the people who hate it and find the characters annoying seemed to have watched it on Adult Swim or in the dubs. That explains a lot.
Am I one of those tiresome people who thinks that all dubs are crap? No, actually, and in at least one case, I actually preferred the dub BUT--
Some of the voice acting and translation choices they made for the dub are miserable. The whole "Believe it!" catchphrase is an American construction they substituted for the main characters overuse of "dattebayo" and "zettai", which is really closer to the character, like, totally using the words "like" and "totally" too much, and is, y'know, super casual and kinda hyper in the way he talks.
I don't want to nitpick my way through all the other crap I hated about their decisions with the dub (well, actually, I do, but I won't) but I do want to stick up for the show a little. I really liked it until I found myself in FillerHolm ("We don't go to FillerHolm anymore...") and then my soul died and I quit watching.
I agree with the criticism of the severely decompressed story arcs, but I'm pretty sure that was in part a sign that the producers of the show were dragging their feet, desperately trying to avoid the the forced roll into filler. The show is based on the manga, but the manga is not produced nearly as quickly as the show, so eventually the run out of material, and they can't just keep writing it themselves because they might find themselves hung out to dry when it comes time to rejoin the canon. This happens to every manga-based series, but Naruto got hit really bad. Japanese comics writers tend to be pretty good about deadlines but maybe Naruto's author just got bored and took a long break...
