All those hostile assumptions. Are you mad I flamed your favourite anime or something?
First off, this was my opinion and not "speaking for the rest of us", and I can think and say what I want. For more information, refer to sig.
I personally prefer anime over manga, whether I watch or read first. That doesn't mean I like all adaptations, because sadly, most are shit. But when it's done right, anime can be a lot better than the manga, recent examples, JoJo, Chihayafuru, Minami-ke, Henneko, SYD.
Now SNK manga has a lot of flaws, which isn't surprising since it is the author's first work, shitty scribble art, bad perspective/ body proportions, can barely tell genders apart in earlier chapters. You shouldn't even bother comparing it to the manga and the people who read it before it aired were hyped, saying it will be the manga but with good art, but the anime was shit. Shit pacing, huge amounts of stills not even including recaps and almost as much QUALITY as psycho-pass. Apart from the pacing, the other points are objective facts because even the fucking studio apologized for the shit quality since they had a low budget. You can tell how much outsourcing they did when you look at the credits and see 10-20 Nguyens.
Also the majority of eps ended with cliffhangers, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Was one of the few things they did right, end on a cliffhanger so that people don't remember the shitty ep but want to watch the next one to find out what happens next.
You are one out of many hundred thousand, possibly even a million people who watched SNK and just because you could care less that it has gore doesn't mean everyone else did. I personally know quite a few people who watched and liked SNK because "depressing feel, gore and blood, titans, fighting, it's awesome cuz titans etc" this included people who never watched anime and always laughed saying lol tentacle porn/ hentai.
As for plot it really isn't much and the manga isn't that far ahead, it is literally, 'kill the titans, I'm a titan, try to go to basement, other people are titans, walls are titans, try to go to basement' it also has quite a few plotholes.
I think you're mixing plot and setting up. The titan setting was unique, if it had been replaced with something like vampires which the author had thought about, it probably would've gotten a lot more flak for all the issues in the anime.