The pompous aspect comes (IMO) from primarily historical reasons. However, in my experience, the judgement of them being "utter crap" is simultaneously (1) mostly uninformed and (2) yet mostly correct.
Let me clarify: people think they are crap for the wrong reasons, such as vastly overestimating the scope of the claims. But they are (IMO) still mostly crap because they are ridiculously narrow and not necessarily clever... Yet they are still valid because that's what the patent system is tuned to.
I have said this before in other comments -- the way patents are examined is mostly quantitative: find enough pieces of prior art where enough snippets of texts cover the text of the claims, and you have a rejection. No thought is given to the quality of the claims. For instance, I'd wager the RSA patent (which even the most die-hard anti-patent folks typically admit is novel) would not be granted today because each aspect of the claims is mentioned somewhere in the prior art. It is the combination of steps which is novel. Yet todays examination process would shoehorn the claims into a ridiculously narrow set of steps that (the attorneys hope) would still typically be infringed.
Examination these days is a mechanical process whereby examiners just try to find enough references with language in them to cover all steps in a claim to issue an easy rejection. (Yes, the "rubber stamp" is more likely used to reject rather than allow.)
So how do you try to qualitatively judge a patent when you have only a few hours appreciate all the prior art out there and appreciate what is being claimed and to do so?
The answer is, you can't; the only way to have a scalable process is to issue actions on a quantitative basis rather than a qualitative one.
As I said, it's a difficult, almost philosophical question.