The film needed work, I agree... it just seems like everyone loves to shovel hate on that film, and by extension Pixar for making 2 films in a row that aren't extremely artistic and preachy. Especially when Sony animation's best film (Hotel Transylvania) was mediocre, and Dreamworks completely slid off back to their Sharktale roots with Turbo (which can't possibly be good no matter what). And Dino Time exists. It didn't get into theaters, but it exists. They had a 2 film slump, and even then, those 2 films are hardly terrible by comparison. They're an A student's B- in a room of D's at best. It needed work, it didn't deserve the Oscar, but it certainly doesn't deserve half the crap it gets. 25%-40% maybe... of course, Happy Feet won the same award. I don't see why that wasn't the big "The Acadamy doesn't know what it's doing" moment.
Think of it this way. Had Mereda been a talking blender in a world inhabited only by appliances and the film had a strong anti-consumerist message, that's what people would expect from Pixar. Their cute thing that shouldn't talk/exist learning a lesson is Disney's Princess film. They get flack for doing them, but bigger flack for not doing them.
And meanwhile, Sont makes a sequel to Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and not only is no one complaining, everyone's dang happy about it.
I guess what I'm saying is, we're getting to an overly critical situation where we look at everything under a microscope and can't enjoy anything. Dark Knight Rise was apparently "Horrible" even though it didn't feature a watered down Richard Pryor, a woman randomly turning into a robot for no good reason, or... I'll stop the joke right there. Every third super hero movie before that sucked. And Fourth ones are the Suck Event Horizon. We love to punish grand things that don't meet our Fan-ficy expectations, and say that directors and studios that did great stuff with one exception have the bast of their glory days behind them. And there's a whole, big fat world of suck out there. Like a giant world of people who make a career out of being so incredibly bad that when they improve slightly, that's the greatest thing in the world. I mean, Brave may not have lived up to some expectation, but they didn't make Marmaduke, and they certainly aren't behind the "Lame Parody Movie of the Year" franchise. Brave wasn't a great film by their standards... Transformers 3 was a great film by Bay's standards. Discrepancy? You bet.