I think being a magical girl fan has a lot to do with how one takes the show. To me, it was okay. A little overrated. Maybe even a little pretentious. Art style is weird squarehead with rounded edges. Only thing awesome is Homura. I don't hate it, it's okay. And I'm not a fan of magical girl so maybe that's why.
Maybe not pretentious, that's the hype having an influence on me.
From my experience, magical girl fans tend to hate Madoka with a passion, while it goes down a treat with fans of arthouse films and LGBT viewers. Just my experience however, yours may vary.
If I may:
I hate weird "art" films. I find media that makes "connotation", "symbolism" and "muh deeply encoded ANGST" more important than tangible plot and visible action to be incredibly pretentious. The moody self-indulgence of movies like End of Evangelion, for example, whose wrist-bleeding "emo" factor teeters on the edge of vulgar, have the propensity to alienate me. My reaction is "get the hell over yourself and say what you want to say" more than appreciating the art for its artistry, simply because the artistry is presented in such an inorganic, overblown and roundabout way, and the value and pace of the plot and character development is lost - as, simply, I lose emotional interest.
Some of you will know what I mean when I say that I'm more of a Kirino than a Kuroneko, in that sense. I'm borderline "kawaii desu desu"; listens to what is effectively weeaboo dance music, engages in waifu culture, even plays eroge occasionally. I don't rip media to shreds with needless overanalysis, and prefer to enjoy it on its own merits - and actually, because of my love for shows like Hyperdimension Neptunia and (to a lesser extent) Strike Witches, I actually consider myself a magical girl fan.
... To give a little extra context, my favourite non-anime movie is James Cameron's Avatar (shut up
).
Yet, despite that, I love Madoka. Okay, I fit under "LGBT" - but what I loved about that show was, more than anything else, the way the characters connected to eachother, and to me, regardless of the "symbolism". I was reading an article about a "Faustian subtext" in the show and in Rebellion, and the relevance of the use of European romantic symbolism in the visuals and music, and I just... Well, I had no idea what the hell they were talking about, honestly, because that "symbolism" works so well as raw atmosphere that it simply wasn't obtrusive enough for me to care. We don't have hours of depressive, psychological, conceptualised discussion on the human condition and the meaning of life; rather, we see a lot of really terrible things happening to a lot of fundamentally good people, and in turn, their own hope in the face of the hopelessness of their situation. While excessive, overblown internal angst and over-reliance on metaphor and symbolism can very easily obfuscate the emotion in situations like that, this does not happen in Madoka. Ever. The symbolism's there if you want it, but it sets the atmosphere just as well if you don't understand it - and I didn't lose much from the series by not knowing about or understanding "Faust", as Madoka worked standalone without prior knowledge of the stories it referenced. It's fully enjoyable without extensive overanalysis, but there's material there to analyse if you want to.
Let me expand upon this a little more:
In End of Evangelion, we have torrents of epilepsy-triggering gore porn. In Rebellion, we have occasional splatters of blood to shock, but it's far more effective in that it isn't being permanently shoved in the viewer's face; moderation makes the scene in which Homura
shoots herself in the head far more emotional than any of the gore in EoE.
In End of Evangelion, Shinji screams and yells and whines and has extensive emotional outbursts, which scream in the face of the viewer: "OH LOOK HE'S GONE MAD NOW LOOK AT HIM MAD". And then, suddenly, he's speaking in hushed tones to Rei and Kaworu, and then out from nowhere there'll be a random scream and Shinji has another outburst and it's all just so... meandering. I can understand that he's under stress, but I couldn't help but feel that the director was trying to encode some kind of deep meaning in the fact that Shinji's emotions are so unpredictable - but it's so extreme that it reads more like "The Universal Guide to Obvious Emotions for Autistic People" than actual, real emotion. The movie's supposed to send a message, but it's lost in the metaphor-drenched and self-obsessed way in which the message is delivered.
Conversely, in Rebellion, we see Homura
spiral slowly into madness, with gradually increasing hints as to her deteriorating emotional state. It's a subtle affair; there's barely any screaming or yelling, and no "OH LOOK AT THIS METAPHOR AND SYMBOLISM, AREN'T WE CLEVER" - what hints are given are subtle enough to be unobtrusive and unpretentious, while the big twists are kept unpredictable yet entirely logical and understandable. Homura
rips Madoka apart because she
loves her; Shinji masturbates to Asuka's comatose body and then strangles her because the director felt like making a point. What's the point? I have no idea. "It's ART!", you'll cry, but please don't let the beret and thick-rimmed glasses fall off as you walk away in a huff; any deeply encoded meaning is useless without tangible foundation. Depth for the sake of the characters and the plot being multi-dimensional and interesting? That's fine, and Madoka has that in spades. Depth simply for the sake of being able to say "WE HAVE DEPTH HERE", and "OH LOOK THIS IS ART" is pretentious - and ironically, for all the "meaning" that the director spent ages manufacturing into the movie, it ends up meaningless simply as a result of how unnatural and falsified it all is.
Then there's the meaningless religious symbolism, meaningless live-action scene in the middle of Shinji's breakdown, a random shot of a dead fish's rotting head in a jar, random excerpts from complaint letters sent to the animation studio after they screwed up the ending of the TV series... none of it has any tangible link to the actual emotions of the actual characters in any
meaningful way. It's just... pretentious, artsy fluff and filler. It's the director making a stink purely to appear "clever" and "artistic". There's no weight behind it.
And that's the fundamental difference between most "arthouse" stuff and the Madoka Magica series; the connotation and symbolism and "meaning" actually serve the characters and the story and are expressed through tangible action, as opposed to taking centre-stage and being shoehorned in simply for the sake of it. That's why it makes sense for me to like it; because everything that I usually don't like about darker, more artistically inclined media isn't present. Madoka Magica has meaning.
... Also, sorry for ragging on End of Evangelion so much. :X
The others, I couldn't care less. Didn't care for when Mami gets her head bitten off. Or the part where someone shot someone pointblank at the platform, though that did give a little shock value in a magical girl show. And so did that conversation that took place in the train, that caught me way off guard. "Like whoa, the characters here are all cutesy stuff, wtf is this talk about bitches and hos?!!" 
(And what is the significance of it???) 
Poor Homura's struggle to change the future, going at it endlessly, ehh... didn't feel anything. Series was too short.
If things drag on the likelihood of it turning to crap increases, which things eventually did with Bleach.
I want more as well.
