To me they're a mixed bag. I've enjoyed many titles from them (Dragon Age, Titanfall, Dead Space, NFS: HP, Mass Effect, Bulletstorm, BF: BC2, and countless other titles from older gen consoles and even older PC games like Archon and Kings of the Beach).
I think that when expectations are set high (most any recent BF release), disappointment is sure to follow.
Even the Dragon Age games had issues. The first one had "HAY BUY THE DRM" plugs in incredibly irritating spots. The second one had like three maps, which made playing a lot less fun than it should have been.
It's not that expectations are high. It's that the games would be outstanding if EA hadn't crappified them. Many of these games have very player-hostile elements designed purely to suck more money out of people.
Maybe it's just me, but for all people like to point out how expansion packs back in the day used to be bad, I don't remember ANYTHING on the level we're seeing with how aggressively they try to milk their customers at the expensive of the experience.
I liked proper expansions where you got a good proportion of a whole game's extra content. I hate DLC where you are encouraged to buy large numbers of small items, because it's a 'death by a thousand cuts' model of sucking way more money out of the player with far less dev effort.
I never buy DLC for any game, on principle. If a game has a lot, I'll reconsider buying the game at all.
I think that when expectations are set high (most any recent BF release), disappointment is sure to follow.