I have heard my dad and grandmother say this is the greatest art museum in the west that neither of them has seen. It must be wonderful.
It was one of my lifetime goals to see the Hermitage. It still is. ;)
My husband and I agreed that we want to go back to St. Petersburg in about ten years; they will have come much further by then, and so will the Hermitage.
The tour groups are huge in the Hermitage during the summer, so that was part of the issue. We could not just "linger" in front of individual paintings, as I prefer to do in museums.
What also surprised me was that, due to limited funds, there is absolutely no climate control in the Hermitage. We were there on a pretty warm day (made warmer by the crowds of people), and I was astonished to see things like a Leonardo painting right next to an open window.
In addition, paintings were hung rather unimaginatively, and the lighting in many rooms consisted of a single row of fluorescent tubes running around the perimeter of the room!
The good news: actual maintenance of the museum and the Winter Palace are getting a lot of attention, and a new coat of stunning teal blue/green paint is going up on the exterior over the lifeless grey that was there before (on the Neva side). St. Petersburg overall is getting a "new coat of paint", and a lot of refurbishment of the major boulevards was done in advance of the G8 meeting, which occurred about three weeks before we arrived.
St. Petersburg was the focus of our trip, and really the reason we took this as our first cruise; we were advised by people who knew that most of the hotels and service are not really up to the standard that we are accustomed to, and in many parts of the world it's nice to see things and then go back to the kind of service provided on the ship.
St. P. is really working on being a tourist attraction, but there are still some rough edges; the port building which we went through each time we debarked was a particularly hideous example of Soviet bureaucratic architecture, and the customs officials who looked at our passports each time were also left over from the Soviet period, in appearance and attitude. My husband and I started referring to it as "Checkpoint Charlie" (jokingly, since we both have been through the REAL Checkpoint Charlie and it was far more grim).