This has also always seemed to bug me. I've owned Bose speakers for 15 years. The little 301's I had in college still sound great - I would routinely have them outperform my neighbor's big floor towers! ...and I still use them to this day.

My home system is an acoustimass system with cubes in front, and the flat wide center channel box on top of the TV. I still use a separate powered subwoofer for LFE. My rear surrounds are some old JBL bookshelves.

I love the Bose because the sound is clean, rich, full, and the speakers are non-imposing.
I hate huge monoliths of speakers. I sure the big boxes sound great, but I'd rather have more room in my modest home theater.

My guess as to why Bose are so disliked is that they promote themselves as audiophile, when they are more "audiophile lite". They are certainly better quality than the usual boxes you see at BestBuy or Circuit City (IMHO), but the temptation is to also lump them in with the _really_ nice, "true" audiophile speakers. It's a whole new ballgame then.

It's kind of like the owner of a nice Buick being snobby about his car. He might be justified when comparing his ride to a Hyundai, but the guy with the Benz S-class is going to dismiss the Buick because it isn't a _real_ luxury car.

Will I stay with Bose forever? Probably not; but until I have enough money to be able to afford a system that really blows me away, my Acoustimass keeps me happy.

The bottom line: Listen to everything you can, and buy what you like best. You're the one who has to listen to them everyday.