My problems with Watchmen:

1. There wer no "heroes" in there. Everybody was less than heroic. The only who tried to do the right thing was out of his ind and did the wrong way.

2. I hated the side stories, the paper clips, the books, the artcles, the pirate comics and all the other stuff Moore used to embelish his story and even let you on some of the clues. I know many people like them a lot, but I really think that it undermines the medium's ability to stand on its own.

3. The coloring. Oh my God, it ruined the art for me in so many places. If it hadn't been for Gibbons's inspiring work I may not have been able to read it through.

4. Something that Watchmen and Moore and directly rensponsible for: It changed the superhero comic-books, a change for the worse, imo.

5. The last page. "Make yor own ending" is so cliche!

6. For a supposedely realistic and so often cited as an exaplarey realistic approach to superheroes, both Dr. Manhattan and the "alien monster" were too exaggerating and way beyond realistic.

Any reason we can't say both?  Like many things in life, ideas and concepts can happen nearly simultaneously and it can be next to impossible to decipher where exactly it all began.

I'd also contend that, more than the books themselves, it's the editors and certain writers of mainstream superheroes who allowed themselves to travel down the path that two books, divorced from regular continuity (and, in the case of WATCHMEN, had nothing to do with the DCU altogether), explored.  Blaming the books and authors themselves seems rather like blaming Wolverine and Punisher (and their respective creators) for ever having been created in the first place.