As other people have stated, their live shows sucked for a while because they were so trashed playing really complicated stuff and it sounded awful, that’s why I really don’t like them for the most part. Secondly, I love metal, but their stuff is way over produced imo. Really talented musicians when they want to be tho so I respect that.

Power Metal in general has a bad rep because of the over the top cheesyness. DF was popular within the genre because they were much faster and had more solos than most other bands in that genre at the time. A lot of people did find them boring after a while since a good amount of their songs sounded pretty similar. But they were considered a solid band, they can for sure play what they wrote.

They blew up during Guitar Hero 3. Now mainstream audiences are exposed to the cheesy lyrics and over the topness of power metal. Gatekeepers gate keeping and now you’re a posers for liking them.

Their band members started living like rock stars in the 80s with their new found fame, showed up to a lot of shows drunk, didn’t perform well. Now people doubt they can actually play their songs.

Fast forward a few years, and they got their professionalism back on track. They investing into better live setups to play even better live than before, things such as in ear setup, timecoded midi changes, etc. They’re solid now and better than their pre-GH3 era, but a lot of damage already done to their name.

I’m pretty sure it’s for the same reason that people love them, i.e. they’re cheesy and self-indulgent - which, I mean, are pretty much prerequisites of the power metal genre.

Back when they first got really insanely famous due to Guitar Hero III, a lot of people thought their music was fake.

They were called studioforce by guitarists who felt threatened by their inability to play TTFAF, and those same haters justified their hate by pointing out that the band themselves frequently couldn’t play it live.

This was due in part to the band still having a janky live setup at the time, in part due to their singer not sounding as good live (when they switched singers to Mark it made a big difference for their live shows IMO), and of course because Sam and to a lesser extent Herman would drink excessively before playing a lot of nights, leading to lots of recordings of their sloppy drunk shredding being uploaded to YouTube.

But mostly, I would argue, the hate came from people who dislike new things. They tried to invalidate the band’s obvious technical prowess as a way to disregard their (at the time) relatively innovative sounds.

You see that a lot in the guitar community. Anything new or that doesn’t fit a traditional, pre-existing mold is dismissed as inferior. Anything non-traditional and obviously skillful tends to draw hate from those same people.

Now that Dragonforce has been around for a good long while, the traditionalists have had time to adjust and Dragonforce has had their live act consistently together for well over a decade, the hate has largely died down.

It also helps, IMO, that Herman Li does regular livestreams so people can see that he’s a relatively down to earth guy, especially for someone with a giant wall of guitars in his house and a collection of high end sports cars.

Because the average person’s ego is made up mostly of things they identify against, which makes them too scared and too stupid to understand stuff that’s creative and awesome.