Besides the point. The anime is still good, if you cut out the filler.
Let's see you come with a better contender then? Instead of giving me that stump of aggressiveness. I'm not saying that everyone likes Neon Genesis Evangelion, but fact of the matter is that it is universally recognized for revitalizing anime when it was in a slump, not to mention that it without a doubt has become a huge cult hit both in Japan and outside of it. It has garnered the most commercial success of any anime ever made and to this day still has merchandise, DVD and BLU-Ray being produced because of the demand for it. Hell, NGE Even has entire theme parks dedicated to it.
The only contenders that have come close to NGE in the past two decades are Pokémon and Naruto (In terms of sales and viewerbase) and Pokémon only has the upper hand in profits when combining everything Pokémon related (We're talking anime sales, game sales, figurine sales, card sales).
I heard that Ultimate Muscle was the most popular anime on /a/, you can trust that it was there, I wrote it myself.
Regarding NGE, if it's good enough for Kojima, it's good enough for you.