Seeing as i was one of the ones "bashing" flagships i guess ill explain. if someone handed me a note 3 and said here have it of course i would take it, if someone handed me 800 bucks and said pick out any phone youd like i wouldnt go for it, or teh s4/s5. in years gone by flagships were needed to be able to at least enjoy android, back on my htc hero (which was htc's flagship on sprint for a while) android 1.6 was TERRIBLE. luckily since then leaps and bounds have been made, i no longer need to overclock a device massively and enable every possible trick to try and break 500 on quadrant.
as android has matured so has the optimzations and hardware. i consider quad core, 1080p, 2gb of ram, 32GB of storage to be what would take to be an amazing device and have no issues with. android gaming has become stagnant, there arent nearly as many games pushing the hardware we have to the limits. the s4 had a PPI of over 400, far too high to be noticable by any humans naked eye why do you need a better screen in there when all its going to do is tax the gpu more and cause more drainage on yoru battery?
i used to have flipphones that could sit and require no charging for 3-4 days, now with android people are excited if it makes the whole day with usage. i want OEMs to focus on that, not how many cores, geebees or wyfyes they can fit in there. every year technology makes massive improvments, they could take a phone that had a snapdragon 600 cpu and shrink it down to probably at least 75% of what it used to be if they tried which would open up space for a larger battery. samsung could really knock it out of teh park if they had some of teh graphene batteries that are supposed to be like 3-4x better than regular ones in teh same size.
so as someone who has owned the SGS1, SGS2, SGS3, SGS4, photon 4g, photon q, evo 3d, desire z, lg optimus g, galaxy nexus, xperia z, and now a samsung galaxy light. i think ive earned my right to say flagships are nice and have their place, but i dont think ill ever consider dropping the money on one. not in this day and age when midrange devices no longer suck and even budget phones are decent.
the s5 is a decent upgrade for anyone coming from the s3, however because of how little a change from teh s4 it is most will eithe rwait to see if teh premium samsung device rumor is real or find another choice elsewhere. you posted a thread asking whats everyones excitment about the s5, people responded with how they felt. no one is saying someone should buy it, just that there are more options and its best to consider them all.