The Syd era Floyd never really grabbed me, either, but in the context of the history of the band, and the era it came out, it's very interesting how it set up the rest of their career, and the talent was there, it just was'nt blues based like the Gilmour influence. I agree, David is a genius and should be given most of the credit for their fame in the later years, but he picked up where Syd left off - and they had already made a lot of headway with Syd's contribution.
Like him or hate him, he was one of the big names in music in the 60's, and I just want to mark his passing with a little respect - we have plenty of time to argue his merit, or lack of, later on.
We became acquainted with PF during the Ummagumma / Atom Heart / Meddle stage, and Syd was already gone by then. But his influence was definitely there.
When we went to the Dark Side Of The Moon concert, it was "What's this?! PF doing rock 'n roll??" IIRC they did the entire album, start to finish.
A unique PF innovation: this was an outdoor concert, and there were huge speaker banks L/R at the stage, L/R at about mid-audience, and one at the very back of the audience. PF had a great deal of fun "spinning" the music around those speaker banks in different directions and at different speeds, something like a Dolby 5.1 trick but this was in 1973 (??).
Unfortunately it made a certain out-of-control segment of the audience even more out-of-control. It was just too much for them.