Ooohh I wanna join this conversation!
I would not say that I hate Innova, although I do dislike a lot of their disc names and colors. That is my only real problem with them. I guess it comes from my artistic mentality, but to me a lot of their disc names are not very clever and they have no continuity, plus their colors are often very drab (although they do have some good ones considering they have a million discs and variations).
I mean come on... Cro, Ape, Katana, Wahoo, Krait, Kite, Skeeter, Monarch, Mamba, Orc, TeeRex, etc... I can dig on the animal motif but they're not all tied together very well and it just seems like their idea department is all over the place. Who wants to throw a "Wahoo"?? This is my main complaint about Innova because the names of the discs should be desirable and make you feel cool but I don't get how you go from Orc to Monarch. One of these things is not like the other.
Also I think a lot of their disc colors are pretty boring and it doesn't help. Because now you have companies like Latitude 64 who have some of the prettiest discs on the market and everyone likes shiny things so their flashy plastic literally outshines Innova's dull discs (Star plastic is especially bland, even though the plastic itself is very good). Again, this is all merely aesthetic but that is part of attracting buyers to your product. And I think their rating system is just a touch pretentious, especially if Innova is widely available for beginners. Is there really a noticeable difference between discs with 1 fade or 2 fade? Maybe I'm showing n00bishness here though because I really don't know the answer haha.
Lastly, I just wanted to say that I got away from Innova because it's what I started discing with when I was still a n00b and I had no idea what I was doing. Well, now I have somewhat of an idea what I'm doing but I had never tried a Discraft disc before so I got a few of those back when I started really getting into disc golf. Now there are a plethora of disc companies to choose from so it seems natural to want to try all the shiny plastic to see how it compares to the grandfather of disc golf (not that I would even know how it compares to my beginner days).