It is not like Origin is that bad. Plus it is a good thing that Steam isn't the only kid in town because while Valve is "benevolent" (I use the term very loosely) right now it might not be in the future.
I dunno, I think most people who trash Origin at this point haven't actually used it recently. The other day I had to correct someone who said that Origin was crap because it doesn't have third party games (it does).
Really the thing that has been making a lot of EA games bad recently is terrible project management decisions by people on the development teams themselves. Dragon Age 2, SimCity, Mass Effect 3, and Dead Space 3 all suffered from this in varying degrees. At least EA seems to be learning because they just let go of a huge chunk of their Montreal studio because it was being managed terribly.
Firstly, a lot of third party games on Origin also require additional things; Batman Arkham City went through Origin, but also required logging into my games for windows live account, which was a clusterfuck, and ended in my game being associated with my Origin account email instead of my xbox live account email for some ungodly reason despite logging into it with the latter. The end result was the game registered on a randomly generated xbox live account with a generic gamertag. Wtf?
Secondly, gaining achievements doesn't show on the application like it does with steam. (Are there any games that do? Curious actually.) Not to mention their first party games don't go solely through Origin; you must register them on Origin, then register them on their affiliated website. Since it's all EA, it's like wtf?? Sims go through the Sims website, then Bioware must be registered to their site; Battlefield has their own crap.
Thirdly, yea, some of those games definitely suffered from bad project management. ME3 is probably the most guilty of this, but SimCity and Dead Space 3 all included specific features that were key to the entire company - DRM and micro transactions, which were something that a lot of the big guys at EA were pumping up as "good" things for consumers. Yea, SimCity would have gone a lot better had they made sure to have active servers; then again it just could not have always been online. I don't know much about the SimCity team, but in the "wants of consumers" I never saw a single person who said, ALWAYS ON YESSSSSS. All the old Sims games/Simcity were not online, and that's how people LIKED them. In general, teams *do* want to do right by their customers. They can fuck it up obviously, and DO, but something like DRM reeks of being handed down as a corporate edict and trying to find a way to spin it pleasantly.
Last, Origin really is just terrible. It's much more stable now, but when big games were coming out, and needed you to be logged in, it was fucking terrible for connectivity. If you wanted to buy a game from Origin, there was a lot of lolz. Not all games register correctly; there literally exists a page that says, hey my game won't register on Origin! REGISTER IT HERE, and then someone places it to your Origin account. (Wtf?) There are desyncing issues, causing some DLC to be unplayable because you are online, but it cannot detect it. Also, if you get kicked off in a single player game during DLC, well...I hope you saved buddy.
Origin is much better than it was, but considering it had such a stellar example to spin off from, a lot of the glaring issues are really inexcusable. That's a big reason why it takes a lot of heat.
The other reason? The company lies or at least tries to PR spin like it's customers are idiots constantly. In just about every avenue; micro transactions, always on, day 1 dlc, etc. People aren't stupid, some things are the way they are because it makes sense financially for the company, but they'd have you believe they do it for you. That's bullshit.
