Thank you for making this thread
relentlessflame 
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I guess to start off I would consider myself as the second definition of a crit you put there, "a person who expresses a reasoned judgement of something." Though people often perceive me as someone who "frequently finds faults or makes harsh and unfair judgements."
I as a fan of anime take in shows to watch based upon my own personal interest, and sometimes hype, because I do like to see what th ebig fuss is all about (Unless it is something like Lucky Star, in which I dare not pick it up).
I usually try to discuss all the shows that I watch, but I do tend to discuss the shows with more diverging opinions more since it just inherently makes all the discussion more intersting. I always feel that it is boring to go into a thread of an anime and see pure appraisal of it as if it was Hamlet. This is perhaps why many people on these forums have commented to me that I seem to "hate" all the shows I watch. Some of the more recent threads in which I have participated in with heated discussions have been Clannad, White Album (This one I actually enjoyed and was not one of the naysayers), Toradora (Enjoyed until the last couple episodes), and K-ON! (Where this thread popped up from).
Something that people love to throw around on forums, especially Animesuki, is that if you do not like a show, just drop it and stop ruining it for everyone else. Now, if I truly hate a show, I will drop it, but because I have a lot of negative comments and don't drop it usually means that I thought the show could have amounted to much more.
This kind of gets into what relentless said above, about certain critics seemingly getting mad at the "senseless fanboys" and the people who just want to enjoy the show to think that the critics are just people trying to troll the threads and ruin their enjoyment.
I hope that people can understand that dissenting =/= trolling and that liking a show that many people criticize for various reasons does not mean you are senseless fanboy.
Anyway I guess I would have to say that the issue that bothers me more in forum discussions is that people feel unwelcomed in threads due to the fear of having their opinon's unfairly questioned.
A forum by definition is a place to discuss. If threads degrade into simply being a place to say "Hi, I liked this episode, 9/10" without discussing what we liked about it or other things, then there is really is almost no point to the thread itself as I could get the same information by looking at the ratings of various anime series in databases such as ANN.