It's a love it or hate it kinda thing with less of a middle ground than other things.

The funniest and most entertaining RPG I ever played was a free RPGMaker game called Unterwegs in Düsterburg. It's in German only, otherwise it would be much more famous.
As much as I loved Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI etc, Unterwegs in Düsterburg just entertained me even more and I was completely surprised because I didn't expect an 'amateur' game to be particularly good. The game is funny and fresh and makes you forget about the rehashed graphics completely. The music is taken directly from all kinds of commercial games but even that doesn't detract from the fun. Story and dialogue carry this game all the way. I highly recommend it!

Download here:
http://www.computerbild.de/download/Unterwegs-in-Duesterburg-2157051.html

I haven't played Unterwegs in Düsterburg, but I could say the same about Die Reise ins All - have you played that one, too? I'm not particularly fond of JRPGs and RPG Maker games, but that one really took me surprise. I haven't seen anything of this quality and nothing nearly as original and funny as this one in a freeware JRPG before. Sadly it's pretty specific to the German language and also very long, so it would be a lot of work to translate it, which is a real shame, since it deserves a much greater audience.

Haven't played that one yet but it looks like something I'd definitely enjoy. I'm a bit tired of the classic generic 'Final Fantasy' type of JRPG regardless of whether they focus more on fantasy or scifi, they all feel the same to me. Earthbound is a bit different but I didn't enjoy that as much as expected, maybe the expectations were too high.
Die Reise ins All looks very promising, reminds me of an old DOS adventure game that I can't remember...not Voyage from 2005, it's an older title. Problem is, I haven't played it so I can't describe the game but the original box is lying around at a friend's house, going to have to dig it up some time.

I just realized the link on the youtube page is dead, so in case you're interested in downloading the game, here's the actual page (you have to click "Die Reise ins All" and "Allgemein" in the menu on the left side).

I suspect that it mainly comes down to the fact that there are a lot of really bad RPG-maker games out there. It's relatively easy to make games with RPG-maker, which means that the barrier of entry is really low, and that means that you're likely to get quite a few hobby projects by people who don't have any real game making experience. These are obviously a valuable experience to the people who make the games, but they are usually not all that fun to actually play.

I think there used to be a rule (I'm not sure if it's still in effect) that if you want to sell your game made by a version of RPG Maker, it can't use the default tile set. As far as I can remember all the games I've ever seen for sale that use RPG Maker have either original assets or use a selection of different freeware assets.

Not that I care. I've played dozens of RPGs based on all the different RPG Maker engines (95, 2000, 2003, +, VX, XP and all the upgrades and so on) and what comes to mind is that even if they use the default tile set, it's easy for them to stand out. Since about 20 to 25 freeware RPG Maker games come out a month in Japan, you need to have a unique selling point to stand out. While sometimes that is, "this is a really balanced orthodox RPG like the Famicom days," it's more often a unique selling point.

For instance, I've played games where:

-You are trapped in a haunted museum and must join forces with a mysterious doll to solve puzzles and get out
-You are a mail courier who is charged with solving mysteries around the world, while keeping up your letter correspondence with friends and making new ones
-You can control the weather to solve problems in the massive forest region where you live
-You are a little girl with her teddy bear who escapes from her room one night into a mysterious world of adventure
-You are a couple of toddlers on a field trip in a game with no battles
-You are learning thief in a thieves' school
-You are the mayor of a village and must often journey into it's dungeon to solve problems and manage the resources of the village
-You are a slime out to get revenge for how you were treated

And so on and so forth. A lot of them have unique elements to their battle system, or interesting interlocking systems for how you advance or gain player characters or level up, or interact with towns, or can play side events, or whatever. Some of them are unbelievably epic, with detailed stories that last as long or much longer than commercial games with all the quality of polish games had those days, but the one thing being different is that the creator is a sole person and doesn't have the talent to create graphics.

A game is not defined by its graphics. I will not remember an extremely well-made RPG for years on end because of its unique sprites for hackneyed fantasy creatures. I will remember it if it has absorbing gameplay, interesting characters, a unique world, creative gameplay systems and other such things.

Obviously there are a lot of RPG Makers with unique assets, like Yume Nikki, Moon Whistle, Witch's House, Creantics, Feel The Wind That's Blowing Right Now and so on and on and on, but they don't always stand out as much as the ones made by people with great ideas who couldn't afford unique graphics.

Incidentally, I've never been able to play games like To the Moon, because English versions of RPG Maker don't tend to run on Japanese systems because of the way the engine treats the language assets for some reason.

I don't like the perspective on these games, this straight 90° Zelda thing. And I can't stand the Zelda-esque toddler-like bubble-heads. It's like all characters are supposedly children. It's really weird in "grown up" contexts. The head disproportion is really something that prevents me to get into Always Sometimes Monster and To The Moon, while I have no problem with other unrealistic styles, such as The Last Door's crude resolution.

It's a convention code thing. Crude graphics are okay if they represent what they are supposed to. But with toddlerheads, it's the message content ("what" is represented, instead of "how") that feels all off.

If you don't have any nostalgia for SNES style JRPG graphics then you probably aren't going to like RPG Maker graphics. I'm super nostalgic for Fallout and Baldur's Gate graphics, so stuff like Pillars of Eternity is what lights my fire.

When you only have 16 or 24 pixels to work with for a character sprite size, making heads disproportionately large is the best way to still make facial expressions visible. In the imagination of the gamer (or reader in the case of kawaii style omake intermissions in manga with otherwise more realistic proportions) those little cabbage head characters and the weird top down perspective environment get reconverted via mental interpolation into a more convincing version.
Maybe this doesn't happen to everybody, and maybe when you play cabbage head sprites they stay that way in your imagination.

Here's a scene from Chrono Trigger as I played it (original SNES version):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3pRXgMv2GE

And this is what I saw in my imagination:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUQcS4xhhqo

The second clip is from the Playstation version but I am glad that I played the old version without the cutscenes because that allowed me to use my imagination, it makes for a more epic experience. Plus the cabbage head characters look so adorable, I never get tired of how funny it looks when they walk or jump around when they get excited, or when little white pixels come out of their heads to show distress sweat drops, all those abstractions are just too funny.

But those weren't made with the default sprites that came with the engine they were made in, were they? :P

I just realized that Toriyama isn't a good example to illustrate chibi vs semirealistic mode as the characters look rather cartoony in both chibi mode and fully drawn mode.

I can understand the way you look at things because I grew up predominantly with Western comics as well so my visual grammar used to be mostly Western, too.
But then I discovered that there is as much variety and as wide a spectrum between cartoony and realistic in Asian illustration styles as there is in Western styles, reason being that Western art influenced Eastern art and vice versa so the range has increased in both.
In the West, Lucky Luke vs Captain Blueberry, Asterix vs Thorgal or even Peanuts style vs Sergio Toppi are as apart from each other in style as extreme chibi manga vs more realistically drawn series like Homunculus, Shamo, Legend of Mother Sarah, Lady Snowblood Gaiden or 2001 Nights - just to name a few that are drawn with much attention to realistic anatomy. They still have characters which display manga typical stylizations especially on the faces but if you look at this sample page from Lady Snowblood Gaiden for example, that is very very far removed from the childish aesthetic that seems to annoy you.
I highly recommend to check out some of the more maturely drawn manga series, I can make more recommendations if necessary.

PS: Btw, I am greatly annoyed at how they decided to make the characters in Monkey Island 3 all cartoony, for some reason I felt very comfortable with the low pixel versions from 1 & 2 and the highly realistic and beautifully painted close ups for the faces. Same with Gabriel Knight 1 vs 3...

Curious about this, now. My immediate thought was of Ib, but the doll bit doesn't quite match up to be that.

That's a Western-centric point of view. The reality is that the major market for RPG Maker (the program) is in Asia. Many people in Asia do not have the best computer--many don't even have access to a computer at all outside an Internet cafe. This is what makes the issue so difficult--Enterbrain is trying to make a program that has worldwide appeal which means--unfortunately--that they go with the lowest common denominator. It's also important to remember that game designers do have alternatives--Gamemaker (another program) allows one to use much improved graphics compared to RPG Maker. Interestingly, however, many games made in Gamemaker still use low quality graphics. Why? Because as I mentioned in my other post high quality graphics are expensive to make.

The point I am making is this: game players like high quality graphics but it isn't necessarily true that game designers do. Game designers have to worry about issues like cost of production and computational overhead (computers with expensive cpus and large graphics cards). RPG Maker is targeting a narrow niche--not only in terms of who plays games made with the program but also in terms of who designs games with the program. That niche isn't for everyone.

Well, didn't see the discussion like this sparking up. At least it is civil.

But yes, I can see why now people legitimately dislike these types of games now.