The Wii gets a bad rap for 2 main reasons. Some people just hate motion controls and everything to do with them, and so they will automatically hate a console whose main focus is motion controls. And at a certain point it became the 'cool' thing to hate on the Wii.

The Wii had a ton of great first and 3rd party games, but like every Nintendo console from the N64 through the Wii U, it had noticeable software droughts. A real turning point came during E3 2008, when Nintendo had pretty much nothing to show but Animal Crossing and Wii Music. That was the moment the 'gaming journalists' turned against the Wii and Nintendo in general.

There is a myth that the Wii sold great for just a couple of years and then fell off a cliff, which just doesn't fit the actual sales figures. The system sold 17 million in 2010 and 10 million in 2011. The most front-loaded Nintendo system saleswise remains the N64, which was outselling the PS1 for a while before falling off a much steeper cliff. The Wii actually had the longest life cycle of any Nintendo system since the NES, being replaced only after 6 years instead of 5 like every other Nintendo system from the SNES to the Gamecube.

And the assertions that people bought a Wii and only played Wii Sports are also demonstrably false. The attach ratio for the Wii was over 9 games per console,with many games selling well over 10 million units.

Because of the motion controls

The simple answer is that people are too ignorant to try to understand the point of it or to appreciate said point. Many cases can be found in this very thread, years after the Wii is dead.

The people that bought those games were not the people saying the Wii sucked. 

Honestly, it's marketing. Or rather the lack of it. Nintendo came into that gen with powerful messaging that really sold the coolness of the system and made a good push towards the core, not just casuals. But as time went on and the system began "selling itself", Nintendo began to let things coast and that's when it started going downhill. As a company, if you don't write the narrative of your brand's image, someone else will. And Nintendo just stopped. Towards the end of the Wii's life, marketing was borderline non-existent. The system closed out with 4 core titles leading the charge: Pandora's Tower, Last Story, Xenoblade, and Zelda: Skyward Sword. None of these were significantly promoted. Skyward Sword was the only one promoted *at all*.

As a result, the image of the Wii simply decayed, as Nintendo's messaging was no longer there to push back against the sheer tsunami of shovel ware that utterly ruined the Wii brand. The Wii has a fantastic core library, but Nintendo stopped telling people that about halfway through. Customers aren't psychic.

I think the problem was for every good game that came out (De Blob, No More Heroes, Tatsunoko vs Capcom, MadWorld, etc.) there were probably hundreds of random shovelware games released (Chicken Shoot, Balls of Fury, Anything Petz, etc.) that just overwhelmed any good games to come out on the system.

The Wii was so dominant in the casual space and it was a time that pre-dated the rise of smartphone games. That everyone wanted to release something on the Switch with eyes on revenue.

This is the most interesting answer I have read so far. I will do some digging into this because it seems to be rather logical and honest. I am not saying you are correct or anything as I feel every opinion is a valid one, but I do think there may be something to this answer that maybe a fact or two can support (or maybe even disprove..

In my opinion it gets bad rap because it was for casuals, so many shovel ware games. My parents even bought one and they used it like 10 times to play wii sports, then they sold it when it was covered in dust. I never found any use as I had a PS3 and eventually an Xbox 360 to sit next to my PS3. . On the other hand you gotta bring out the good in the bad- the wii introduced casuals to the gaming market and turned them into gamers whereas they bought a PS3 and Xbox 360 eventually giving them both a late peak and starting out new in the current gen.

And the counterpoint is just as compelling. I am not going to lie, this is what I wanted. Compelling points. I do not think Wii was as hated at the start as it was later on and the later on hate has stuck around with a lot of gaming media and fans of gaming claiming to hate Wii. I do remember a lot of people claiming doom and gloom and maybe I do not remember it as strongly because I think every Nintendo gets that kind of treatment. I will be looking into your points as well. Rol, I know you normally make great posts but I did not see this one coming. Thanks to you both... hell, thanks to all of you that have replied.

It didn't fit the "hardcore" philosophy and still sold like hotcakes so the self-proclaimed "hardcore" had felt threatened by it (for some reason..?) and come up with a palatable excuse as to why it sold (ie stupid cazualz, motion controls).