NGE is alright, but I sure hope for you you viewed it with the Japanese audio. All the voice actors for the English voice-over are talentless Southern hicks.
(Even if they werent they'd be terribly unlikely to outperform the original)
Also the last 2 eps are not BS, I thought it was an interesting ending for the series. And also throughout the series there are some hints about 25-26, hence Shinji's walkman. So (as usual) disregard Ulric's advice.
(One could however argue that a better viewing order would be episodes 1-24 followed by the movie 'End of Evangelion'. followed by the movie 'Death and Rebirth' followed by episodes 25-26. But ah well.)
And jesus3, Shinseiki Evangelion is actually 10-11 years old already ;-) This is 2006 remember? ;-)
Also I would like to ask 'what genre'? The whole psychology/messed up shit never really became a genre imho, and the Japanese 'big robo/mecha' genre dates back to the 70s with stuff such as Getter Robo and Gundam 0079. It is true however that NGE spawned a lot of foreign fanboys =P But Ranma 1/2 is one of the TRUE great anime classics.
.hack//SIGN is not exactly a short series, it's a standard length half-season (26 episodes) series. It is the most common number of episodes used, though 24 and 50 happen too.
As for .hack//SIGN I found it somewhat annoying since Tsukasa is such a whiny bratty angsty kid, but ah well... it is fun I guess. It has an excellent soundtrack, and when I made Zer watch it he made loads of jokes about it. (Someone dies... OHNOEZ MY DROPPILE!)
If you want to see a truly good anime, with an interesting storyline, in a fantasy-setting, and characters that develop quite a lot, I would like to suggest 'Juuni Kokuki' (also romanized as Juuni Kokki sometimes, and translates as 'The Twelve Kingdoms') which is about 45 episodes long (was supposed to be like 68, sadly they suddenly cut it short) and def. didn't bore me. First few episodes might seem a bit weird, but hang through and you'll be rewarded. ^^
Anyhow, back to the topic... if you wanna view NGE I would definitely recommend the a2ka (a2000a) encodes. (the movies are stored in .ogm with softsubs though, so you'll want a media player that can properly handle subtitles such as BSplayer, Zooplayer or MPC (Media Player Classic) (#a2000a is an irc channel I hang around a lot, and they made by far the best encodes/subs for NGE) Catch it on bittorrent... or if I know you and you give me a hug, I'll u/l to ya directly. ^^
PS. Another good one is KGNE (Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien, translates roughly to The Eternity You Desire) which runs for 12 eps iirc and is more of a serious drama/soap than a regular anime. =P
Well, that's enough for me. Gimme a yell if you desire my services. ^^
"We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice."