Buy it. It's not that bad.
Everyone's just mad because they let their hopes get up and they listened to the CA apologists who said everything would be fine and dandy at release. As others have said, all you need is a little context for previous Total War games to know that this is kind of par for the course. I grant you, there are some terrible design decisions that no patch will ever fix, but I think 80-90% of the game will be great sooner or later.