Well THAT was controversial! Some people like it and some people really hate it. (All these links are full of spoilers of course.)
I don’t hate it. I still feel this was one of the best shows of the Spring season (but the competition isn’t fierce.) Still, I was originally hoping for something more, something on the level of the other anime adaptations of Jun Maeda stories that I have seen: Air, Kanon and Clannad. All of these were better executed and have far more emotional impact.
Angel Beats seems more like an intriguing first draft that COULD have been truly great with a rewrite and a demanding editor. This is the first time Jun Maeda has actually written an anime series. The other stories were written as visual novels, and adapted into anime by someone else. Writing VNs probably doesn’t teach you everything that you need to know about pacing and character development in a television series.
Steven claims that the ending is totally illogical. I don’t really see a problem.
All in all, an interesting story, even if the execution is flawed. If Kyoto Animation could remake (and greatly improve) Kanon four years after Toei’s original version, perhaps in another four years…?