Honestly, I think whether or not you think a fic is utterly perfect or really flawed or whatever, there's always a 50/50 chance that the reader might not like it. There are a lot of fics that have come highly recc'ed by people that I trust, and that I can tell are well-written, but that just... don't do it for me. On the other hand, there are a lot of fics that are kind of shoddy in places but totally make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, and a lot of the time those are the fics I read when I need Comfort Fic.

So true. Even people who I know have very similar tastes to mine will react differently to individual stories; a 'good, but does nothing for me' when I'm saying, 'holy shit wow wow wow,' or vice-versa.

I'm more trying to establish a baseline here. I can't make every reader have a wow-wow-wow experience with a story; I can't even make any single reader do that all the time. It's more - I want people to know that, at any rate, the mechanics will be good, or the story will be worth reading, things like that.