There's nothing wrong with OpenID in my opinion, I use it 9:10 times logging into this very website through ClickPass. The thing that doomed the project, from what I've been reading (and I've done a lot of reading because I thought it was a great idea) was the lack of documentation.

Both technical documentation and soft documentation ranging from how end users should interact with it, and what the best practices are. This seems to be an Achilles heel of a lot of projects like this in various patterns regarding informing users how to use it, versus how developers can develop for it.

I love OpenID too, I use it on every single site that supports it. However, I hear that people don't like it very much, probably because of the reason you mentioned. It's very sad, I think it had (and still has) great potential. Another problem with OpenID is that non-technical users can't really understand it :/