Yes, it's very odd. And Matt Smith keeps saying in interviews how the character just gets so much better because now he feels like Moffat is writing specifically for him.

I sort of have my own hypothesis that may have no basis in fact about it, which is basically that when people were writing for s5, with the exception of but even to some degree including Moffat, they didn't really "know" Eleven yet so I think on some even subconscious level many of them would be writing either a generic Doctor voice or a more Ten-ish voice than maybe they realized -- Neil Gaiman admits that, when his script was bumped from s5 to s6 and had a chance to watch Matt for a season, he had to go back and change some of Eleven's dialogue to make it "less Tennant-ish and more Matt Smith-ish" or whatever. Which you'd think would be great, right? But it does make me wonder if maybe the writers for s6, because they got to base their Doctor off s5 and not a vaguely generic/Ten-like Doctor, ended up just kind of... amplifying the quirks and everything Eleven had in s5, making him like 500% more tawdry quirks with less depth or whatever thread of familiarity had me liking him in s5. It's like they watched s5 and came away with a checklist of characteristics for Eleven but they were all things like "likes hats" and "uses the word 'cool'", rather than any actually interesting things.

That's all based on nothing more reliable than my own reasoning and speculation, but yeah.

Yeah, I don't understand how Matt could say that. That might just be one of those BS actory things actor people say when they're trying to be nice. Like how no one ever really said the dialogue in the Star Wars prequels was shit, but they were all thinking it.

I basically totally agree with everything you ever say, lirl. I think it may be that what we liked about Eleven in s5 was that there were still some very, teeny tiny traces of Ten in there, which gave us something to hold onto. But yeah, the checklist the writers made appears to have been terrible and based entirely on physical attributes and quirks rather than even something as basic (and fascinating) as "Eleven is borderline autistic," or even going further to say, "Eleven is borderline autistic by choice as a reaction to and defense mechanism to all the god-awful things that happened to him when he was Ten." See, look, I just pulled that stuff out of my ass and it's already way more interesting than anything in s6a, in my opinion. I think people either aren't trying very hard to make Eleven his own character, or Moffat is has some sort of machine that takes a script and sucks all the soul out of it and then delivers it to the actors, who do the best they can.

In short, Moffat's Who sucks EVEN WORSE than I thought it would. I actually thought he might win me over but uh, no. He's failing hard.