I am one of the people whose negative comments about Evernote you reference.
The thing is, there really is nothing on the market that does what Evernote does. Sure, there are dozens (hundreds?) of good solutions for plain text notes. But Evernote also does paper. And photos (of signs, napkin drawings, etc). I have put tens of thousands of sheets of paper through it -- the latest (excellent) ScanSnap scanners will scan directly to Evernote.
And then it does dual-language OCR on those, in both English and (in my case) Japanese. That last bit is very important for almost everybody living outside of America -- you want the local language of your business documents to be OCR'd, but just about anywhere you also want English OCR. I have years worth of bills, business cards, etc in there, that I sometimes need to search against in either language.
There are personal database type apps out there than can do part of this, like EagleFiler, Yojimbo, and DevonThink, but nothing I am aware of syncs to the cloud so that you can both access and input any kind of data on any device you use. That part is the other killer Evernote feature. I/O everywhere.
The search function works decently and it works on the mobile devices, too. E.g., last week at the HN Tokyo event, the conversation drifted to the topic of registering one's personal seal (that Asian stamp, sometimes called a 'chop', that serves a signature). I was able to pull up the PDF of the official 2008 registration document for my own seal within a few seconds on my phone, while we were still talking about it.
That kind of ubiquity is really nice.
My problem with Evernote is the horrendous, truly awful client software (especially on the desktop, which is where I do 95%) of my use. I would not trust them to maintain my data without backups -- though I wouldn't trust any service that way -- but I have had Evernote lose data before it can be backed up. This is usually just the last page of notes, or the audio of a meeting, though, and not a huge set of data.
My workaround for that is to no longer use Evernote clients to take notes. It's just terrible at that job. Even on the highest end notebook Apple makes, for example, it literally can't keep up with typing after 2 pages of notes. And then it will crash, losing your last few paragraphs of notes and any audio recording.
So now I do all my note-taking in other apps, I record meetings and calls using other apps, and then I manually throw those things into Evernote. But (at least in my case) Evernote is mainly as a ubiquitously-available repository for inputting and/or searching and viewing of all paper mail, work bills, contracts, business cards, presentations from others, product catalogs, meeting notes, conference call audio, photos of whiteboards, passport applications and birth certificates for my kids, medical records, old tax returns, etc etc etc.
In other words, it is just a kind of gigantic network volume, with some added search indexes and (optionally) my own notes about the files it contains.
I am pretty confident that I will be able to move off of Evernote this year (but then again I think I said that last year and the year before). Dropbox is taking baby steps toward this -- they have added rudimentary searching of the contents of (some types of) your files, but are clearly years away where Evernote is.
DevonThink[0] -- an ancient, Mac-only personal DB -- has recently added Dropbox syncing. Their Mac app is incomparably better than Evernote's, despite being ancient, but even if the sync works well (I'm currently testing it out), their mobile apps are so bad they may as well not exist at all.
I think eventually, the mythical open-source "Evernote killer" that people talk about will emerge. Just as I assiduously read every thread on HN about Evernote (in hopes of learning of some new alternative), I watch every Camlistore[1] release with great interest.
I'm sure we will eventually get a standards-based, multiple-implementation solution because the problem is really just 'need a big pile of stuff in the cloud that I can add to, perform highly specific searches against, and view from anywhere'. But I don't see any signs that this will happen very soon.
[0]: http://www.devontechnologies.com/products/devonthink/devonth...
[1]: http://camlistore.org