Yes, I think ARIA was poor, I barely made it to the end of the first ep. I have no idea about the manga, speaking only about ARIA the Animation here, but it was pretty much as if you took YKK, took out everything that made it awesome, and left only the absolute lack of anything happening and "yarrr, dis here simple things be good" attitude. Oh, and the cute/SD elements were played poorly too, I have vast amounts of hate for inept attempts for cute.
Having read a couple volumes of the manga, there was one single chapter I really liked and one other that was almost good, while the rest either felt just terribly derivative of YKK, or just shallow in comparison to it.
Had much potential but was diluted by spoonfeeding and too many attempts at trying to be cute. In terms of content, it's not much compared to YKK but it makes decent preparatory material for younger readers who want to try out slice of life stories.
To its credit, the shows had excellent music and visuals.
