The gameplay has only been improved from AA so to love it and find AC crap is bizarre.
In your opinion.
Did you listen to the last day of the Bombcast GOTY podcast? Brad pretty much summed up how I feel about AC.
I didn't enjoy the traversal (same reason I dropped Red Dead prematurely and loved the shit out of Just Cause 2, makes all the difference in an open world game for me).
I'll say it again, it was too open for its own good. Other games are more open (and better for it) and yet other games are more linear (and again better for it). I don't see how people can say that this game being more open makes it objectively better (because I don't think it does).
There are other small niggling complaints I have which I didn't have with AA but to be honest it might also be the fact that I played AC in, what was it, 2009 and AC in 2011. My game history had increased a whole bunch in the interim and that experience may have made me more critical/less forgiving of the things I didn't like about AC.
Crap was an exaggeration on my part, more an expression of my feelings towards the game. I realize it's a high quality game with heaps of stuff going for it. I just couldn't find the fun in it.