Personally, episode 1 was meh. Mildly interesting, but if it wasn't such a big part of geek culture, I wouldn't bother watching any more myself.
I am very much with you on this. Me and my wife are the only two people I know who find Doctor Who (20xx era) to be just "OK". Not terrible, not great; often entertaining, but never enthralling. It seems like the rest of the universe is either deeply in love with it, or hasn't heard of it.
Near as I can tell, the problem is that the mix of episodic plot and serial story is almost perfectly wrong to hold my interest. A lot of the individual episodes have interesting ideas and great plots and enemies, but there's always some annoying background long-term character thing going on in the background that detracts from it, and makes it impossible to watch the show randomly (syndication style). On the other side, there's lots of long-term character development plot that is genuinely interesting, but never seems to work for me. The show assumes a level of investment into recurring characters as soon as they're introduced, and I never feel invested as fast as they want me to be. And then every time I actually start getting into a character, that character disappears. It would be infuriating if it didn't make me feel so blase about every new character. I can get into more specific complaints if you don't mind spoilers.
My recommendation is to get through at least a dozen or so episodes before you decide if you like it or not. Don't skip any. See if the pacing works for you. It obviously works great for a lot of people, but certainly doesn't work for everyone.
Also, I would recommend watching any two-part episodes in a single sitting. Some of them are the best episodes of the show, and you really want to watch them straight through. Others (IMNSHO) really have no business being longer than one hour, and you'll want to blast through them as quickly as possible just to get them out of the way and get to the next episode.