I always find this topic interesting, because it shows such a diversity of... aesthetic instinct? If you ask a dozen people why they don't like something that's known for being divisive, you can easily get a dozen different, incompatible answers.

People talk about the subjectivity of beauty, but I've never felt like the sheer polarity of opinion gets enough emphasis...

(For the record: Dwarf Fortress's controls never bothered me, and I've never been able to play without a tileset. The same for NetHack and other ASCII games.)