Why is there not much love for them, just curious?

My view, mechanics are crazy, unbalanced and there are tons of splat books/expansions, each more ludicrous than the last.

Granted, this is based on my exposure to RIFTS.

Rifts has great background and world building, they built an over the top gnarly all consuming maw of terror and combat. Like that. Pics/artwork, awesome.

Mechanics are just unusable.

yeah, I have to agree.  I love most of the Rifts setting, but it is horribly unbalanced.  How do you kill an alien intelligence with 250,000 MDC, with a gun that does 4d6 per shot?  Short of having a squad of MLRS nuclear launch vehicles, many of the enemies are really ridiculous.  it goes similar for player classes.  Why be a vagabond or rogue scholar when you can be an atlantean undead slayer or a demigod, or any of the many other super powered inhuman classes they introduced in each new region.

I really enjoyed several rifts games I played when I was in high school, but it was always a system that needed serious house rules and work arounds.  But a wandering gunslinger with a laser pistol was always a fun character to be, old west or not.

Worldbuilding in Palladium games, especially Rifts, is definitely awesome!

But I have to agree about the mechanics: they're just plain difficult to keep track of. There are SO MANY books, and no easily searchable database of mechanics.

So it's a non-uniform collection of core rules, for the most part.

the rules are universal, they just don't work very well in practice.  To me it was always a problem of scale, but my experience is with Rifts, some Beyond the Supernatural, Heroes Unlimited, and Nightbane.  Defense on powerful enemies seemed to far outstrip offense.
And in Rifts, there were just so many options for players that it pretty much forced you to basically decide ahead of time limitations on what people could be.  That tended to piss off high school age role players that all had different ideas of what was cool, but again, that's just my experience.

I feel like Palladium came up with their rules for their Fantasy world...then they just kept conglomerating other worlds onto the same rules system.  It's kind of like they decided they wanted to be a good alternative to D&D (and I feel like they were, as that goes...I'm kind of generally unenthused about level-based character advancement, so I wasn't a huge fan of their game, in general.  But I felt like, as a fantasy game, at least, it was actually superior to D&D, at least back in the mid-90's)...but then GURPS came along and they said, "Oh, yeah, we can do that, too!"  Only GURPS was better suited for universality, because it was written to do that, in the first place.

I never really got a chance to play Rifts...I had roommates that were big fans of it, I think I made at least four or five different characters (a couple of which were the same character, recreated for a different roommate's game, because I lost the first character sheet), but I can't recall a single gaming session where we actually played, rather than put characters together.  But, yes...balance was definitely an issue.  One Glitter-boy could easily wipe out the rest of our party...my renegade Dog-Pack Trooper couldn't even shoulder a weapon that would so much as scratch his paint.  I'm a believer that a good party can work without the characters necessarily having to be balanced...but I can't envision any way that our Rifts party would have worked...even if the GM had averaged out the abilities of the characters, half the party would have been cannon-fodder and the other half would have been bored to tears.

I would guess that some of the other Palladium games, where PCs and NPCs were on more even ground--like Robotech, or Ninjas and Superspies--would work better, but I never tried playing them, so I really don't know.

it's all conceptual.  a glitterboy is effectively a tank, a war machine designed for front line combat.  So comparing a foot soldier to a tank never works.  Then again, a glitterboy can't exactly walk into a coalition city and investigate a murder.  It only gets worse when stuff like demigods and all the various supernatural creatures enter the mix.  It can be played, if the group works to try to get a common theme and rough power level, but it takes a lot of work and cooperation to get it right.

What GladiusDei says. Really enjoy the world-building and entirely happy with the imbalance because it works both ways... but can see why the love is missing here

In addition to everything said above about the games themselves, Siembieda's often shady business practices and his hair trigger on lawsuits makes me not want to give the man one red cent.