I don't consider cardano to be a hated project. People give it some FUD here and there, just like they do with anything else. I also think that it did a lot better than the other projects in terms of price, during the past years.

The only big negative that I remember was during the 2021 bull, that they figured out there's a very fundamental bug in the project which prevents it from running smart contracts and sending transactions in each block. That was a bad one.

I dunno if they did (or will do) anything about it or not, but it was a huge disappointment to me personally. I believe it was one of the reasons why ADA didn't go higher than $3 during the bull, otherwise it could have been exploded even bigger than it did.