I think Medieval Merchant is an excellent game, especially if the players know it well.

It's a very competitive game of route-building. (Hence the airline comparisons - I think it's a much better airline game than, say, Air Baron.) Players construct networks of roads to connect cities. Or rather they add existing roads to their growing networks - the available routes, and their costs, are printed on the board.

Every road has a fixed cost (though some roads are very cheap, and some are very expensive). Every city produces a fixed income (some are poor, and some are rich). However, the game is not won by the wealthiest player but the one who has the most influence. Money counts for influence, but you also gain influence by getting to cities first and forgoing their income to control them, and also by extending your network into all of the regions on the map. The game is thus very tricky to min-max. You win the game by expanding your options, reading your opponents, and knowing whose throat you need to cut.

The last game of it I played was at a convention, with three other gamers who had sharp eyes, knew how to play, and used their downtime to plan their moves: we managed to play a complete game of it in 25 minutes, and it was a very intense 25 minutes indeed. All of us were in contention up to the final turn. Expect the game to take at least twice as long to play with inexperienced players.

The rules are tricky for beginners to follow, I find. The first items in the sequence of play don't happen on the first turn, which throws them off. I find that setting up the game with a sample network in place and walking through the sequence of play helps a lot here. The rules use unwieldy terminology, too: "open a new branch" and "add a branch" mean two different things, are performed at different times during the turn, and have very different effects on the game, but it's easy for a beginner to confuse the two. And the functioning of the double-move tiles which are critical, is not exactly intuitive.

The board is also tricky for beginners to read. It takes a couple of plays to realize how important it is to not let one player have Luebeck all to himself, or to realize that Koln isn't quite the deal it looks like it is. The road network is very deviously constructed and plays some geographical tricks: there are some very cheap long roads and some very very expensive short ones, and two cities next to one another often are connected only via extremely indirect routes.

I like this game a lot. It's very nakedly competitive, which has its good and bad points. There's very little luck or concealed information in the game, and such luck as there is doesn't carry as much weight, I think, as beginning players think it does. (Jay Tummelson posted something a while back about conducting demos in which he deals himself all of the weak cities and wins the game anyway, which I have no trouble believing.) As with a lot of tight multi-player games, a player who isn't reading the situation right may not just lose but may accidentally give one of his opponents an opportunity that he didn't earn.

I can see why people might dislike the game, but I think it's a gem.