[prawks]

In my humble opinion, I put them on par with pagination of articles (not good).

Of course you click through if you're intrigued enough. I'm not sure carousels are meant to create intrigue about a product. I'm not really sure what their purpose is. Every carousel I've seen has been probably better off being displayed all at once rather than one at a time. This is the Internet, many people (barring disabled/elderly users, who shouldn't be ignored) are used to consuming a lot of data simultaneously, most don't want it fed through a tiny straw.

I see them as a design fad that are typically asked for because someone's friend/competitor has one, or "ooh, ahh" 'ed at by clients who didn't know animation on web pages was possible.

[drharris]

Yeah, this is my typical feeling on it. I think they do have a use case (primarily as an image slideshow for something unimportant like a header image), but they are way overused these days. But, I'm not a designer, so they may know something I don't. I am a user though, and they seem like noise on the page to me, so maybe I know something designers don't, too.