manboy86, your rather correct, but the way I'd look at it, is your not dealing with a tiny catagorey within a genre (Like Horror movies, or RTS games). It's more like it's own media, akin to Video games, or Movies, or Music.
That's why it tends to be rather absurd for when people give out a blanket statement towards hating anime, and do not cite "I dislike the artwork, or the fact that it's not real life", but rather, cite the worst possible examples of it. Its almost like me saying "I hate Music because of shallow teenage girl and boy bands, and emo music", or "I hate movies because of horribly designed horror movies and slapstick comedies".
Anime is a really big market, and the most common ****, the type that is generally conjured up in thought when anime is mentioned, tends to be the most overhyped, bastardized (by censoring, edits, and soforth) and lame ones. Poke-yer-Man, Yu-gay-oh, the countless ones with giant mecha and big swords (keep in mind that a stunningly large population of gamers worship Final Fantasy 7, which encorporates many of those anime qualities), and other's with very cheaply done, commonly seen artwork (The type that you voiced complaints about)
There is a lot of on mainstream stuff, that, like with music and movies, shows itself to be ahead of the common crap.
Berserk is hand drawn artwork, beautifully done, within a medieval world (No elves, with some supernaturalness in it, but not overdone), with a very mature and violent atmosphere to it. The lead character would borrow more from Conan the Barbarian than any mainstream anime.
Akira is an obvious answer. It's by far not some childs shallow movie, but a very artistic one.
Ghost in the Shell as well.
Jin-Roh deals with a Post-WWII Japan (I think in which the germans won, but it's not very clear). It seems very much a political thriller, and the closest thing to mecha you have is the German-Wehrmacht based body armor/helmet worn by the special ops in the military. (
http://features.cgsociety.org/galleryimages/90099/jinroh.jpg Certainly, the plot when I saw it seemed suited to have been a live action holywood film.
Understandably, a huge amount of it, and especially the population that enjoys it, can be very agonizing to deal with (I particulaly hate the influence it's had in making more people think the Katana was some sort of Nuke of Antiquity), but I do think that there is bound to be a more serious and artistically done anime out there that might adhere to anyoen's interests. It's hard to say you hate all video games, all movies, all music, because of a genre within it, after all.