Considering a bunch of people seem to be a) fairly keen on it and b) seem - at least at first glance - seem to have thought fairly hard about issues related to UX and aesthetics, surely you can put a teensy bit more effort into your critique?
EDIT - money where one's mouth is time. Here's my take: There's some great stuff and some slightly less convincing stuff in the original 'Material' concept pitch but the problem is that the devil lies firmly in the details and it's already getting Cargo Cult-ed to hell and back - even in Google's own core products.
However - I've generally found the quality of the critiques to be far below the quality of the topic being critiqued and I'm quite comfortable calling people out on lazy reactions if they haven't bothered to convince me that they've given the subject the attention it deserves.
EDIT2 - Another thought has congealed after reading some more comments. The cargo cult is partly the fault of the original pitch. You can't propose something that is ostensibly as based on abstract principals as 'Material Design' is and only give a single implementation as the example without inviting people to fail to see through the surface details. Show us 'Material Design' with a completely different look and feel and then we might find it easier to grok the underlying principles and not get hung up on the specific choices made for this particular implementation.
Or to put it another way - how would Material Design look if you wanted to distance yourself from the new Google branding as much as possible? What would remain constant?
I don't have to say much, just go and read the manifesto for Material Design. It's a lot of words that don't mean anything [1].
Another problem with it is that it's extremely trendy. Bright, almost fluorescent colors, ridiculous amounts of whitespace almost to a fault, long shadows, arbitrary grids for icons, etc.
The bigger problem is that Google decided to become smartasses about creating a new design language. They took it way too seriously and I think who this hurts the most is the developers who make apps for Android. They don't know what Material Design means -- really means, as in how Google sees it. Third party developers will never really be able to adapt it properly and what you're going to end up with is a whole new type of visual fragmentation in Android.
This look already looks dated, and I can't imagine what it will look like in a year.
EDIT - money where one's mouth is time. Here's my take: There's some great stuff and some slightly less convincing stuff in the original 'Material' concept pitch but the problem is that the devil lies firmly in the details and it's already getting Cargo Cult-ed to hell and back - even in Google's own core products.
However - I've generally found the quality of the critiques to be far below the quality of the topic being critiqued and I'm quite comfortable calling people out on lazy reactions if they haven't bothered to convince me that they've given the subject the attention it deserves.
EDIT2 - Another thought has congealed after reading some more comments. The cargo cult is partly the fault of the original pitch. You can't propose something that is ostensibly as based on abstract principals as 'Material Design' is and only give a single implementation as the example without inviting people to fail to see through the surface details. Show us 'Material Design' with a completely different look and feel and then we might find it easier to grok the underlying principles and not get hung up on the specific choices made for this particular implementation.
Or to put it another way - how would Material Design look if you wanted to distance yourself from the new Google branding as much as possible? What would remain constant?