I would say I'm surprised that people STILL dislike Steam, but I used to be that way, so whatever floats your misguided boat. You'll come around eventually.
Let me share with you when I started to question if the Steam boat is really a luxury liner or if, under all the glitter, it may not be a prisoner transporter.
I have about 800 games on Steam and probably spent several thousand bucks over the years. When the Civ5 expansion was announced, I pre-ordered it. The only bonus was a 10% discount. On the day of the EU release, Steam sold the expansion at 30% off. I wrote in and asked for compensation, even offered to take store credit. I had figured it would be a small issue, since it was their mistake (they even said so in an email) and I was a good customer.
No go. They blew me off hard. Now, this was only $10 or less, but at that point it became a matter of principle. Normally, I would have charged back the payment and re-bought the expansion, however, if I had done this, they would have disabled access to my account for at least some time. Basically, I could swallow helplessly or go out in fight and gain nothing, and this drove home to me that relaying on Steam for your entire library is essentially like living in a dictatorship:
You can live perfectly fine right up to the point where you disagree with the leadership, and then you realize that you, in fact, have no rights. Sure, you can walk away, but you can't take anything with you. That's the way it is with Steam, too. You can stop buying stuff, and if you walk, you leave everything behind, so you are still forced to visit frequently and contribute to whatever statistics are kept. And if you walk away and make a fuss, the stuff you leave behind will be taken away, too. No other store can pull this, because normally a store doesn't own everything that you supposedly purchased from them before.
The consequence is that I went from buying several games per week on average to buying pretty much nothing. I spent the $99 on the founder's edition, and that money went fully to Stardock. I'll keep using Steam, because as a PC gamer you have little choice (and THAT should be the wake up call right there). But I went from being an avid supporter to a dissatisfied customer, and I now spend more money on console games than PC ones (those that are not bound to an account).
So, do keep having fun on your boat. Just make sure you don't ever disagree with the captain and pray to Gabe that you won't ever run into any situations where they force you to choose between the stuff you paid for and not getting screwed over.
Ahoy.