That's your opinion. I believe that if some one that had never heard pearl jam was to sit in a bar and listen to them play there "hits". I bet most people would walk away saying either they were ok of flat out sucked. People like pearl jam because of all the hype built around them IMO.
This one is a tough one to argue for me because I can see both sides of this one; even as a die-hard PJ fan, theres times when I gotta do a double take and ask "WTF is he talkin' about?"
I think being a Pearl Jam fan is very relative to your age and what music you listened to in the 1980's.
To really understand Pearl Jam you have to have been coming into adulthood in the early to mid 1990's. You also have had to watch some of your favorite bands get corrupted and made into pop icons by MTV (Metallica please take a bow). You had to have attended, or at leasat wanted to attend the first two Lollapalooza festivals ('91&'92). To this day one of the best times of my life was Lollapalooza 1992 with Lush, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Ice-Cube, Ministry, and the Chile Peppers.
Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Sound Garden, Alice in Chains, Bob Mould's several bands, and all the rest of the Seattle scene groups gave us a way of thinking, acting, and dressing that let us say "FU! We're not drinking the Kool-ade" to the music execs that wanted everything to be cookie-cutter pop music. In addition, it was a fight against the over-indulgent and gluttonous attitude that swept the country in the 1980's.
The reason Nirvana earned so much hatred from those of us that really believed in the ideas of the grunge movement was because Nirvana repeatedly drank the Kool-ade, then made meaningless gestures to try to atone for it (Oh...you wore a "Corporate Magazines Suck! T-shirt on the cover of Rolling Stone. Wow, you're such a rebel. Oh you started a mosh pit while performing at the MTV VMA's which you supposedly disdain. Wow, fight the power, Kurt.)
Anyway...alot of it isn't about the music. It's about the attitude that defined us GenX'ers that makes us fans of the grunge bands.
I personally enjoy Mike McCready's guitar work and Veder's vocals even if most of the time you have to read the album jacket to know what the hell he's saying.