No, a lot of D&D players, usually the ones who were playing through 2nd ed and farther back but not always, don't really like FR at all. And their arguments have some merit. For one thing magic in FR is totally ridiculous. FR is like a comic book continuity now - it has a little bit of everything, with room for still more, and just about anything that could happen has happened. Gods are all over the place. Epic characters are numerous. Don't even try making sense of world timelines. And that's useful to a lot of DMs - it allows a lot of room for improvisation and connection to the gameworld at large without running much risk of totally fucking things up, since cataclysmic events seem to always be on the verge of occurrence - but it's still pretty fuckin' outrageous.
The only reason I like it is because I have become steeped in it via some excellent CRPGs. And so my warm feelings toward the setting have primarily to do with Wizards' canny marketing of the setting.
All that said, give me back Planescape, or better yet Ravenloft, any day.
As for Drizzt, he is very obviously a Mary Sue character (from wiki, emphasis mine - "a pejorative term used to describe a fictional character who plays a major role in the plot and is particularly characterized by overly idealized and hackneyed mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, or having too many, and primarily functioning as wish-fulfillment fantasies for their authors or readers. Perhaps the single underlying feature of all characters described as "Mary Sues" is that they are too ostentatious for the audience's taste, or that the author seems to favor the character too highly.")
I have no doubt that sometime back in the late 70's-early 80's somebody actually rolled and played through a game as Drizzt Do'urden, but the reason he has become, rather undeniably, the single biggest hero in D&D fiction is that he, as a character, cheaply plays on all sorts of tired tropes and the sensibilities of the hardcore nerds who play D&D. He is a good character from an evil race, turning away from his evil destiny and the temptations of power and yadda yadda. He is an unparalleled fighter who fights with two swords and he has a pet panther. But he also has a sensitive and quiet soul and is good at heart. Most tellingly he's socially shunned for being different but only a righteous few are able to see his true worth. It's easy to see why so many people are drawn to the character, he's the sort of intellectualized badass that nerds wish they could be, he's exotic and mysterious and formidable and feared. The reasons why he's so beloved are the same reasons the internet won't shut the fuck up about ninjas. Same principle.
That's not getting into the still-cheaper ways that Drizzt is an exploitative character, like the hyper-sexualization of the Drow (which ties into the rather conservative sexual politics of D&D as a whole)
