I began to loathe Chess 960 ...

It's unbalanced, broken and pointless. After kissing the curb in my recent 960 games, I came to the conclusion that this variant should not be taken serioulsy and not even to be considered real Chess at all (like Omega Chess, e.g.). I have some ongoing 960 games but after I'll have my ass whooped in nearly all of them (as it appears to me), I'm done with it. I'm actually doing quite well in regular Chess and making some progress, so at least I can be sure that my opinion about Chess 960 is objective and not distorted by my hurt ego. 

Anybody else felt the same disappointment about Chess 960 as I do right now?

So are you saying you have a loathe-hate relationship with Chess 960?

You, I believe, are suggesting that you can excel within the constraints the rigged game of chess and patterns set up by those constraints, which you have learned. But if you have to think flexibly, in very fluid non-standard positions, you quickly encounter the limits of your rigid thinking.  I'm sure that is frustrating. Then, is it better to excel at mediocrity or suffer defeats while striving for true mastery?  

Bruce Lee, Kung Fu master and movie legend was very Taoist and fluid.  He believed in learning the forms and rituals as a foundation, but then having the mastery and freedom to transcend them in real battle. So, in some ways, we might say that Bobby Fischer, inventor of Chess 960 was like Johnny Cash's famously immortalized song, A Boy Named Tzu

So to summarize the main idea of your comment, you're saying that 960 should not be taken seriously as a form of chess because you aren't good at it?

But, if I were to poorly re-state your statement, as some people here have recently misstated my statements, I could say something like you're suggesting that he's no good so he's taking it out on chess 960.  But I don't believe that is true.  Still, I don't really know what the "Big Decline" is.  Who or what is declining?  How is it big?  What is the nature of this decline?

lol, yeah, perhaps! 

The first time I played it on lichess.org half a year ago and LOVED it! It seemed like a really great way to rejuvenate the grand game of Chess and I began experimenting a lot. I could beat the Lichess engine (no idea which one they have over there) on Level 1 almost 50% of the time, which was back then a huge accomplishment for me!  I never could do it with normal Chess, so I imagined myself having a natural proclivity for it. But ... well, guess I was wrong on that one. Nowadays, after 1000 games or more, I'm seriously fed up with it. It's flawed, in ways I can't even phrase. I suppose the "Random" character of the game puts me off, because you can't memorize the openings from one game to another and the tactics which saved your neck the last time will never be applicable in any other game again.

EDIT: I'm a slow typer ...

It lost my respect, yeah. I perceive it as a time-waster these days, because I realized it's not getting you anywhere. Regular Chess trains you for Chess 960, but if a person only played 960 for his whole life and became pretty good at it, I daresay he would be destroyed against a guy with a rating of ~900. Whereas the opposite is not true at all. All the notable 960 players in the world all played solely normal Chess and just recently were introduced to Fischers new variant, and they still excel at it. Because they have so much talent at regular Chess that for them it wouldn't even matter if the game only consisted of rooks and knights. But I was a bit too harsh with my wording, so if people take it seriously, I don't have a problem with it. They merely have a different opinion than me in this issue, that's cool.

I've only played one game of chess960 here (for some reason it never showed up in my stats) but I've determined that I need to figure out how to play regular chess before I mess with any variants.

I hate 960 games too.  I don't see the point of jumbled up chess pieces on the board and play chess with them.  I don't like 960 because I suck at it.

There's an old saying: "If you are good at Chess 960, you can do anything".

In fact it's about 40 seconds old now.

Well I don't know, Chess 960 is pretty jumbled up but it's still fun to play if you know all the tactics and all that stuff. But overall, I don't like it.

Was it ever intended to be fun?  It seems like it would be useful as a training tool for advanced play.

ya I think you're right 

Don't we actually play some sort of Chess 960 literally all the time? I don't wanna create a new thread for this new question, but isn't the normal starting position of any ordinary game among those other possible 959 ways to set up the board? If yes, then the term 'Chess Variant' doesn't really apply to it. 'Amplification' would be more fitting, because it just extrapolates from the existing rules and doesn't introduce any new elements to it. That's not necessarily an argument against it, just an observation of mine.

I love Chess 960 as allows one to be creative. Mates can come quicker in games if you or your opponent is sloppy. Opening rules can sometimes mean nothing due to the position of the pieces at the start of the game.

Each board is random and some similar to others. So if you have a strategy to certain types of boards it will be like playing an opening that you use in a game. Also is great way to practice attacking and defending the position and pieces.

I'm with royalbishop,it's a great way to be creative.

I have broken so many fundamentals and theories of chess and won Chess960 games. Now you just have to know when to not follow the rules so closely.

This is real good when your opponent stick to them all the way and i strike real quick looking for mate. I try to keep them on defense as their pieces are already in bad positions most of the time at the beginning of the game. If  he/she play  accordingly i go with the fundamentals. As i figure why play 30 -50 moves when i can try to win it in 20 moves against an opponent who is not paying attention to piece movement and just mindless moving pieces.

It is fun as i can try wild ideas that cause problems for my opponent to me that is what Chess960 is when i play. Make it fun and frustrate your opponent is another key as they are playing from a setup they are not famaliar with in the game. Work on attacks and defense ..... most of the time i just work on all out attacks even if i make a mistake most of the time i can continue it 2 moves later. I brink as many pieces as i can as quickly as i can which really makes it fun.

in response to owltuna: One thing which I haven't written above: The first-move advantage is sometimes overwhelmingly high, forcing the Black side for the rest of the game (it's opening stage will be crippled and in the middlegame it'll be unable to conjure a meaningful attack) to be passive-aggressive, while White is gobbling up all the space in the center.

The firstmove advantage is only high when the White side knows what he is doing.  

Normally it's just advancing your pawn so one of your bishops targets an undefended pawn on the enemy side. Black must react then, while White can can continuously build up pressure which A) furthers his own development and B) prevents any real countermeasures from his opponent. Nothing like that happens in the regular starting position.

Another thing I missed to outline in the OP was the impossibility of Chess 960 to compare one game to another. You can't really learn anything from playing many games, because each one demands a different approach to the opening. When I was new to the game I perceived this as one of the variant's strengths, that no matter how prepared you were, you were still forced to calculate your entire strategy anew. But maybe the bishops weren't meant to be cramped in the corner squares, or perhaps castling which transports your king literally across the entire board aren't meaningful aspects of the game in the fashion it was intended. So many times instead of advancing your pawns towards the center to, you know, play Chess, you're forced to first rectify your screwed initial position, e.g. check for any loose pawns on the second row, make sure your opponent can't insta-mate you, check if castling makes sense at all (if the king is at the very back of the board) and then somehow make use of your scrambled pieces, which led to many awkward and tedious middlegames, where you spend most of the time trying to liberate your pieces before they are "silenced" for the whole middlegame, by which I mean they're stuck on their initial places without the free space to have any influence on the center. Maybe I'm just frustrated, but for me 960 is a dead end in Chess, which might also explain the abscence of high-stakes tournaments or the lack of titled masters who get really involved in it.