I think the complaint about how the Civil War questline was "written" is often a contradictory one.
Right now, on vanilla skyrim, the Civil War can be pretty sweet. It won′t be if you exclusively power through it. But if you power through things, only doing strictly whatever your quest told you to in order follow to the next stage, that′s your own fault. Nothing forces you to do that. The game is filled with Forts, Camps, roaming soldiers, cities with supporters of both sides. You can be creative and turn the quest into three times its size simply by doing things you chose to do without anyone telling you to, because you′re roleplaying a character who makes real decisions.
Now, if the quest were three time its size in things you have to do to finish it, wouldn′t that bother those who "don′t like to play action games"? I find it contradicting because these are usually the people who say the quest is badly written.