qualification when talking about anything aesthetic is a huge no no. never do it.

everything has to be the greatest thing that ever happened or the shittest.  nothing inbetween

i once believed in that as an article of faith (when i was reviews editor at Spin for a year, i tried to make it so that review grades were either 10s and 9s or and 1s and 0s- ie. just like in the UK music press - my thinking being that if something is a 6 it might as well be a 0 really if you think about it - although the editor in chief was initially attracted by the idea of bipolar reviewing, a dynamic range from gush to snark-sneer.... ultimately this didn't go down well with my employers, who favored the measured New Yorker-aspiring tone. Things got tense and in the end I quit - second-best decision of my life)

however in reality, the truth is there's lots of things in music or whatever that are neither amazing nor reprehensible... there's the aesthetic equivalent of mixed emotions in terms of response to them - movies or records that have some things going for them, but major failings or flaws, wonderful aspects but also off-putting elements

art, like life, is not necessarily black-and-white

so nowadays i quite like the ambivalent, conflicted, attracted-yet-repelled, weighing-it-up approach to criticism 

but perhaps i've just mellowed with age. succumbed to stolidity...