Not going to lie, I have a soft spot for DCA 1.0 but it is purely nostalgia based. My nostalgia glasses are heavily tinted.
Obviously Disneyland was the better park and DCA 1.0 wasn't up to that standard when it opened but it opened around the time that I was really starting to get into the Disney Parks fandom because my family became annual passholders through my father's work. At that time, the entire dynamic of the park(s) shifted for me. No longer was this some, mythical, unreachable place that I visited one a year if I was lucky, but instead, it became a weekly visit with my family.
Because DCA didn't offer much for the whole family the way Disneyland did though, my parents didn't spend much time there and as a youngin', I was made to follow. But as I got older and even more interested in the parks (during middle school and high school I really started getting into the history of the parks, Imagineering books, insider articles online, etc), I was granted more freedom. Thus, the elusive and seldom visited DCA became a point of exploration for not just me, but all my friends at the time too.
I know that sounds lame, but it was our experience. We soon discovered that DCA offered us the ability to do some things that Disneyland wouldn't like riding "bigger" more "thrilling" attractions for a fraction of the wait time (due to the park's creative failures). It became a kind of fun, hot-spot for us to spend time hanging out, grabbing a bite to eat, hopping on some pretty fun/thrilling attractions with little to no wait.. in a sense, we became that crowd I think Eisner was trying to appeal to in the first place.
-and while even at that young age we were obviously able to tell that there was a substantial difference in quality between an area like New Orleans Square and the giant burger over in Paradise Pier, it was still a fun experience to be had by us all because it was so.. *ahem*.. "different". I'm not trying to make excuses for the park's past failures or creative choices and I know that the reasons these memories are so special to me are mostly in part to who I was with rather than where I was.. but at the end of the day, I still look back fondly on my time in early DCA. Ironically, the things that made it a failure and drove others out of it were the things that made it so strangely alluring to the friends I still have in my life today. In a sense, the park (for all it's flaws), still brought me together with folks I care about and was a place I could have fun with others.
I was excited with the direction the park was starting to head around that 2008 time frame, though a small part of me did feel a little bit of selfish sadness (which makes little to no sense from a creative standpoint, I admit) because I knew the park was going to get "better" and start bringing in the crowds and that a piece of who I was growing up would be disappearing forever. But as a Cast Member at the time, I knew it was for the best in the long run. I was still looking forward to it. But now, I have to agree with others that the sense of direction which formerly seemed to make a little bit of sense, has been lost.
