Yea I always wondered the dislike for this game too. For me though this is the game I started on and never knew the other 5 existed for a long time. I literally thought it was just a play on all the space stuff back then using numbers and what not and didn't realize it was actually the 6th game. This game (SQ6) and Freddy Pharkas are my go to games when I need to go back and get that past feeling I think about these 2 games daily I swear lol. I played both of these games all the time back then never getting anywhere in either of them because I couldn't figure them out and the internet was just basic at that time. I don't recall ever getting off the ground and if I did it was probably a rare thing and that I don't remember, because I remember the street scenes and anything that resembles that to this day. As in Futurama reminds me of SQ6 as does Star Wars in the bar scene. Like even though I never got into Star Wars nor do I care for it, but that scene sticks out for me and I've only seen it like once lol. So again for me this game is great but let me get into the other games.
Now for me I'm mostly into P&C games that have voice, rarely do I play any game that doesn't have voice weather it be P&C or otherwise unless I have to, which makes going back to some of these older ones a bit hard for me to do. I did play SQ1 VGA and it was okay, it was short and wasn't a whole lot going on but this was a few years ago so it wasn't all that impressive to me. If I had played a lot of these adventure games back when they came out that I missed out on I probably would like them a whole lot more but this is where I'm at. Then I played the remake of part 2 and I didn't really get into it that much and the voices were mostly annoying to me. I know it was a fan remake but still just didn't do much for me. I was also hoping for a remake of 3 with voice and such but that obviously didn't come about and I wanted to play a bunch of the fan games but never got around to them and that's kind of where I ended up. I still want to play 4 since it has voice and possibly 5 but I will have to be in the right mood/setting to play those in order to enjoy them better. It's kinda like Jason X of Friday the 13th, that's the movie that got me into that franchise even though I've known about it since I was a child lol.
Also one last thing is now that I'm older with much less time it's hard for me to enjoy a P&C game nowadays because back then when I had all the time in the world and no internet I could just walk around clicking on everything and enjoy it for what it was. Now though when I play games I just have to get through them as fast as I can in order to get on to the next game on my long backlog list of games, like ToonTown I rushed through that a few years back but wasn't that enjoyable but I feel like I would have loved it had I played it when I was younger.