In my opinion, Evangelion is not worth the time spent to watch it. It's regarded as a standard by many, but the characters are very shallow and the plot never seems to advance.
Evangelion isn't highly regarded by many because of the story or character development. It's because it was something completely new at the time it was made: A deconstruction of the super robot anime.
In a traditional super robot anime when the teenage protagonist has a look of determination on his face and gets in his mecha, he's going to beat the bad guys. When the same happens in Evangelion, it means Shinji is just going to fail extra hard. In a traditional super robot anime, the female lead aggressively scorning the male lead means they are obviously going to get together at some point. (Which is REALLY stupid.) In Evangelion, it means Asuka has horrible psychological issues and the whole thing just ends in strangulation and bedside jerk-offs. It's like the anime is telling its nerdy fans: "If a woman who has done nothing but indicated she hates you, it doesn't mean she wants to make the babies with you, YOU IDIOT."
To me Shinji's creepy behavior towards Asuka is maybe one of the most authentic things in Evangelion, because the show treats him as a person. We're shown that sometimes we're not supposed to root for someone because everyone who is a jerk is making his life miserable. In narrative structures this is obviously a good guy, but in the real world people who get consistently shat on just become horrible people themselves. I always saw Shinji as growing up to be a serial killer, or maybe a child molester.
The super robot action in Evangelion? It's okay, but nothing special. The symbolism? Well it's just symbolism. It doesn't really even symbolize anything in particular. Hell, most of the time the symbolism just seems to symbolize symbolism itself, if that makes sense. The plot? Oh just get out. The plot is horrible. It's so intentionally vague and mired in obscure religious references that you might as well be watching the final episode of The Prisoner and pretending it makes sense.
Really at this point in time Evangelion has completely lost its relevance. When it was made it was amazing because it did nothing you expected and kicked the viewer in the fork at every given opportunity. It pretty much kicked off the super robot anime equivalent of the Dark Age Of Comics (which was the worst thing ever), where every cliche was turned on its head so often that things like "male lead believes in courage, so OF COURSE HE'LL FAIL HORRIBLY" became cliches themselves.
Fortunately GaoGaiGar, and later TTGL reconstructed the super robot anime, and those were pretty amusing shows. Gainax's TTGL was even kind of a subversion despite being a complete homage to the history of super robot shows. Suprisingly few people I know have liked the ending where Simon gives up spiral power, but really I think it was appropriate because the opening scene of the first episode was pretty obviously an alternate bad end where spiral power just makes people keep fighting until they grind the universe to dust, and is pretty much the sort of thing the anti-spirals were trying to stop.
I sure am glad I'm not a nerd at all