I liked Ultimate Spidey but I've yet to read a comic by Mark Millar I liked and his fingerprints were all over the rest of the Ultimate Universe, so I disliked a lot of that (I've read about 2/3 of the Ultimate X-Men run and the first 2 Ultimates series hoping I would like them, but ultimately not doing so-I do think the 2 animated Ultimate Avengers movies took a lot of the concepts and de-Millarfied them enough to be enjoyable though). . I thought Ellis on Ultimate FF was one of his brave failures, and didn't end up liking it, but I did check out the Ultimate Thor mini in trade form form our library and really liked that.

As for Bendis, I think his creator-owned stuff is brilliant, and his Ultimate Spidey and Daredevil were the best things he did for Marvel. The rest of his Marvel stuff I've read is mediocre at best, but rarely terrible except on the big tentpole event books which he doesn't do well at all imho-House of M was just plain bad and Secret Invasion was an idea (it's what a race of shapeshifters should do) I really liked but poorly executed). But I've not read a lot of what he's done for Marvel for the past 2-3 years as I haven't been buying much new stuff.

As for the idea of the Ultimate Universe, I think it was a self-defeating idea. Take the core ideas of Marvel and update them to be relevant now is an idea that might seem to work, except any update you do will be just as dated as the original Marvel U within a decade, especially since the world we live in changes at a much more frantic rate than the world did in the 20th century. The pace of change in society is exponentially faster in the 21st century, so any updated concept is going to become dated that much faster creating a perpetual need to keep updating and recreating, so there is no extended lifespan possible in that paradigm. The idea makes whatever it creates obsolete too fast to be sustainable and the UU sowed the seeds of its own demise in the concept for its origin. It lasted about twice as long as I thought it would.

-M

I never had any interest in Ultimate Marvel. By the time it came out, I was getting into Marvel Masterworks and actually reading the originals, so it seemed like a waste of time and resources to update and more or less retell the origins of all those classic characters. Ultimate Spider-Man was probably the most "necessary" title looking at how Spider-Man had been screwed up since the Clone Saga (and I'd posit that the seeds were planted since the marriage). Still, I wasn't impressed with the bit I read of it and the slow pace. I had zero interest in the nasty, brutal version of the Avengers seen in Ultimates.

I think Ultimate comics would have been unnecessary if they would have taken the vastly underrated Heroes Return era model (people seem to forget that it was a success) and expanded on it. Not driving out creators like Busiek and Perez would have helped, not to mention the infantile concept of turning everything into a watered-down version of Watchmen and DKR's. I loved both, but I was never impressed with Quesada's era, Bendis as a writer and certainly not Mark Millar. Alan Moore thinks most of these guys are jokes, and rightly so! (Sorry for the bitchy rant!)

That's kind of the same problem the New Universe had back in the 80's

I really enjoyed Ultimate Spider-Man. Some of Bendis's best work. Decompression and all.

Hated Ultimate X-Men.

The only time I enjoyed Ultimate F.F was *gasp!* when Mark Millar was writing it and Greg Land was on "art." I can't believe I just said that.

Never read Ultimate Avengers.

Ultimatum was an ultimate abomination.

I thought the idea of starting a parallel Marvel Universe with revamped versions of the well-known heroes was silly, if the idea was to create a line that would be more "new reader friendly" for lack of a convoluted continuity. As mrp observes, such a new line would see its own continuity accrete over time, and defeat the purpose of the exercise. 

I still gave a few titles a chance, just in case. I thoroughly loathed the first issues of Ultimate X-Men. They seemed to combine the worst of fannish wish fulfillment with the worst of lazy plot points. They also were replete with instantly-dated pop culture elements probably meant to convey the idea that these comics were hep or rad or the cat's pajamas, such as goatees and bandanas and body piercings. 

Ultimate Spider-man was just decompressed. To this day I still don't get why the mag was so popular. I didn't like the art, the stories were competent but nothing revolutionary, and, well... it was simply a good Spider-man comic. 

However, my opinion changed when I read The Ultimates (written by the same Mark Millar whose work on Ultimate X-Men I had so disliked). It read exactly like an Avengers movie. And a pretty darn good one, too! That's where I saw the Ultimate line's potential : instead of starting a new Marvel Universe that would get bogged down in its own continuity after a few years, it could be the paper equivalent of a cinematic universe inspired by the "real" Marvel universe. A line that instead of aiming to publish 300 issues of the Avengers, would tell a great 12-issue story and end; then if successful would repeat the exercise for a sequel a bit later, and so on and so forth. Given the slow pace of publication, it would be years before the continuity problem surfaced. (Unfortunately, as with the Spider-man movies, the good stuff ended with Ultimates 2!)

I was a bit annoyed when the Marvel cinematic universe did become a reality, because instead of using the Ultimate line to feature the movie heroes, Marvel decided to retrofit the ones from the real Marvel universe (giving us a Tony Stark who was wounded in Afghanistan, Samuel Jackson as Nick Fury, and a Knowhere that looks like the Wild west). But hey, it's their toys... they do what they want with them.

I have those issues, but for the life of me can't remember what they were about.