I feel the experience of many people writing with ASN.1 is that of dealing with PKI or telecom protocols, which attempt to build worldwide interop between actually very different systems. The spec is one thing, but implementing it by the book is not sufficient to get something actually interoperable, there are a ton of quirks to work around.

If it was being used in homogenous environments the way protocol buffers typically are, where the schemas are usually more reasonable and both read and write side are owned by the same entity, it might not have gotten such a bad rap...