I agree. I came to the Buffyverse late and though I enjoyed it, I never really connected to the whole world mythology. It was all so oversimplified and black and white. I never appreciated that in the Buffyverse vampire=evil except in these two very specific cases. Spike was always more interesting for me than Angel, because at least he got a little say in his moral choices at various points. But yeah, the extent to which I liked either Buffy or Angel (and I may have actually liked Angel better) was in spite of the vampire characters, not because of them.