It seems that a lot of people really hated Wesley -- did you and why or why not?
no. my grip is that the writers could never find anything for him to do or say, until he was necessary as a plot device. i liked the idea of the character, but i thought the execution was poor. ironically Wil Wheaton apparently feels the same way about the character. they did better in DS9 with Jake, but that's because he had a foil in Rom.
No, I did not particularly like Wesley Crusher. It wasn't his fault, really...the writers were to blame. Basically the main problem I had was that he could walk into Engineering, take a look at a screen Data had been studying for an hour, and immediately say, oh, you should do such and such and that would fix the problem. I mean, no one is that smart...Data's an android and supposed to be one of the most intelligent people on the ship. It really irritated me that Wesley, who originally had had so little training, was smarter than Data and Geordi combined! Interestingly enough, even Wil Wheaton, who played Wesley, hated the scenes that made his character look that way. Wesley himself was a nice enough kid, but those scenes really irked me. In later Star Trek series they did a little better: Jake Sisko, for instance, wasn't such a mechanical genius, which made him easier to watch. And Icheb (from Voyager), was extremely intelligent, and even came up with some pretty ingenious ideas, but he wasn't smarter than the rest of the crew. Plus he had emotional issues (his parents genetically altered him to use him to kill Borg: you can imagine the effects of that on a young teenager) which made him easier to relate to.
when he 1st came out i had a bit of a love/hate relationship with him! i loved the fact that there was a cast member i was very close in age to(i was 12 when next gen came out and wesley was 15,i think,during the 1st season of next gen)! i hated the plot device of wesley either saving the ship or being able to figure out something that the adults missed either every week or every other week very annoying! it was like ok we get it he's smart! it would've been like beating us over the head every week with data's superior android abilities every week! i started to warm to him as the seasons went on and was actually a bit sad when he left in 4th season! when they brought him back in 5th season for the game and the first duty,i was excited! now with the game i was excited and a little disappointed at the same time! i was disappointed because they went back to the old plot device of having wesley(once again)save the ship! however he got to hook up with ashley judd(ensign leffler)in that episode,so fortunately because of that i was able to overlook my disappointment! the first duty was a fabulous episode,i liked it because it humanized wesley somewhat! although i could've done without the grand revelation in season 7 that wesley was actually a god-like being!
