I dunno; I agree with you that the main camp of people who hated it just didn't know what the whole Kouji Kabuto joke was to begin with and were thinking "why isn't this the protagonist i'm used to?". Thing is, as a big robot anime fan (and somebody who watched KGNE), I thought AM was kind of lame. The problem with the Kouji Kabuto joke is that they don't really go anywhere with it. They just kind of drop a Go Nagai hero into a standard formula and have him behave as his formula dictates. Too predictable to really make me laugh.