Actually with gear scaling the drakes now, with good gear you don't even need to use the barrier when he's focused on you.

"I could never figure out why people hated EoE."

It's the same reason why many players hate vehicle fights in general. You spend all your time learning how to play your class. You customize your User Interface, your keybindings, and your macros. You maximize your gearing for your class and role.

And then, suddenly, you are thrown into a vehicle and have to essentially play a different class, and none of your gear even scales (I realize that has changed but that's how the fight was originally). Suddenly you are no longer tree druid with awesome gear, perfect UI and tons of practice, but noob dragon-mage in a poorly visualized 3d environment.

If you were not a rogue or a feral druid, and you customized your unit frames, you probably didn't even have combo points visible.

Even now, with the vehicles playing better with custumized UIs and the dragons scaling with gear, I still dislike Malygos because of the poor way that the dragons "handle" and the general difficulty I have visualizing distances in a 3-d space with few referents.

Based on how much people still hate the fight, I think I am not alone.

I'm ground-based healy druid, not a flying mage, damnit.

Dammit Jim, im a doctor not a pilot!

I also don't see what the rage is all about when it comes to vehicles. I understand the "time and effort put into a rotation and UI, why make me change it" argument, but frankly the reason I don't play dps much anymore is rotations get tiring and the vehicle portion of fights tend to be small, only two fights in the entire game (Occ/FL) are completely vehicle fights. After I did my first demolisher quest in BT, I honestly couldn't wait for another one because I found them so much fun.

Now granted the new system, especially in those first couple patches, was pretty clunky and still is in no way perfect, but I actually found it a nice change over from the usual 1-2-3-3-4 rotation. I think if the system was a little smoother I don't think people would be as angry.

I found it enjoyable to have to wrestle with something new for a short amount of time, and, as was said above, it really wasn't a huge deal so long as you knew WTF-to-do before you got on.
Where people seemed to get frustrated in EoE is when they saw 5 new buttons and just started mashing them incomprehensibly hoping to win. I think Blizz should have given players a good 30-40 seconds before P3 began to wrestle with these new controls, before having to start dodging and mashing.

TL/DR- I think vehicle combat would have been less of a chore and more of a welcome spice to a fight had the system been a little smoother and the transitions a little less "omgwtf".