People like me were waiting for a GI Joe movie for decades. It was instead kind of a hack that could have been any other movie.
I don't think that the distaste came from the fact that the movie could never live up to memories of childhood play. I think that the distaste came from the knoweldge that Larry Hama had decades of fun and wonderful stories to tell, he had written an entire little universe... and the movie was nothing like it.
It hardly even resembled the cartoon.