an icepick through the keyhole

Then I'm not sure anything else I can say is likely to enlighten you. Frankly, if the Algernon Fortescue example in my earlier comment didn't do it, I didn't think anything else would. It is, of course, a perfectly tenable viewpoint that you can play the Doctor any way you like as long as he's vaguely British. I just don't share it. The character had specific attributes that have not been carried over, the lack of which make him, to me, not the Doctor. As if Macbeth were to be played broad Devonshire, or Rooster Cogburn as a Welsh hairdresser, or Hercule Poirot as a Swedish stevedore. Just because the character was played by different actors, in different styles, does not mean he had no identity of his own. That identity was deliberately, and unnecessarily, thrown out. And I watched all eight original Doctors first time around, so I do think I know what constitutes a regeneration.

I apologise that you thought I was being patronising, offensive, unfair or inaccurate. I had, and have, no such intention. This thing is hurting me every week and I can't ignore it, and if that seems silly to you, I can't help that either. It's this or scream.

You want to know what would satisfy me? Doctor Who would satisfy me. A Time Lord played as a Time Lord, with a companion or two of varying ages, genders and origins, in a TARDIS that looked like a time-space vessel in which people might live and not a grotty garage, in stories that had been written by people who cared about what they were writing and didn't feel the need to shove in gratuitous emotional manipulation and unnecessary sexual tension every single episode just to paper over the cracks in their storytelling. And then say "oh but it's just for kids" when people complain about plot holes and inconsistencies and downright unfunny silliness.

That would be a start. Give me that, and you can keep the rest. I'd even do without the Daleks. But the more successful this formula is, the less likely it becomes that the Doctor Who I want will ever happen. Which may go some way to explaining why I am just a trifle bitter about this.

Or it may not, of course.

EDIT: and as for the superficiality of it, when it comes to judging a character in a television programme, what do we have to go on apart from the look and the sound?