The outcry after the allmusic.com redesign was completely wild. Waxy.org has a good summary. Along with all the "internet views Thing X as damage and routes around it" comments is one remarkable development: The allmusic corrector is a Mozilla Firefox plugin that undoes a lot of the bad design decisions on allmusic.com. Among the truly wonderful things it does is a wall to wall replacement of ugly and dysfunctional javascript links with good standard hyperlinks (the link targets were always there, it's just that allmusic was designed to take away their value. So now for the first time in history, allmusic has permalinks all over the place, and tabbed browsing works!
That completely reverses my opinion of the redesign. We probably wouldn't have the good links without it, meaning that the redesign was a good thing since it made Adrian Holovaty write the plugin.