I suspect people hated the ribbon when it was introduced because it was an unexpected change, forcing users to learn something new when they just wanted to be doing actual work.
The problem with the ribbon is that discoverability is extremely slow. If I'm looking for a piece of functionality, it's much faster to read through text menus looking for related words than to inspect a similar number of unfamiliar icons to figure out if they are related. Its keyboard usability is also not as consistent (e.g. alt+f, o to open a file from almost anywhere in the app)
Once you know where everything is and what the icons mean, it's probably better than nested menus for use with the mouse. Since that describes most of the person-hours in the software, this is an improvement on average. New users and those who lean heavily on the keyboard still aren't going to like it, though.
I still hate it - it takes attention, and I want to give the app as little attention as possible, so I can concentrate on what I'm writing, not the process of typing.
Im surprised my passion with witch im hating it hasn’t ceased a bit though it’s only when I use Word and I forget about it when I close it. Some things don’t make sense to me still, it feels dumbed down and more inefficient.
I still hate it, because it's a unicorn UX that doesn't follow any pattern that other software uses, and IMO is not an improvement in any way over the other standard options (normal menus). There's no special problem that Word faces that other word processors do not, so there's no reason for a screwy and impossible to decipher unless you've already memorized it UI.
So I hated the ribbon when it was introduced mostly for Excel. Because I did maybe 6-8 spreadsheets a year, but I had been doing that for at least a decade. It took a long time to build new muscle memory for the location of the small bits I use. Now? It doesn’t bother me, but at the rate I use it, it took years to get there.
I don't think most people hate it any more.