Anime belongs in the trash.
Well, I can contest this. Sort of.
Anime is a visual medium. It conveys a story visually, the same way a movie or a television show would. Arguably, with the amount of CG and technical feats film has managed, it could simply be called a style of telling a serialized story or a style of presenting a film. There's nothing inherently wrong with the concept.
The issue is that it's heavily diluted. You could say the same of American film and television, but we (as viewers) typically have ways of shortening the list. In television's case, it's a lot easier to find shows that are well written if you look at cable television. Network TV? Mostly garbage, and it's not because they're not allowed to swear or have graphic content. It's in the poor rehashes of scripts.
With anime, it's a lot harder to identify the gems. For once, the popular series at this point tend
not to be good, and the anime fandom is incredibly toxic and defensive. It's hard to get a straight answer on what shows are good, so people will often get different people giving radically different answers.
I don't think it "belongs in the trash", but shows like Sword Art Online, Attack on Titan, and Akame Ga Kill being popular (alongside the still-somehow going harem genre) over actual well-written works like From the New World is pretty strong evidence the medium has recently taken a huge nosedive since 2010. Of course, I'm just another biased (and somewhat disgruntled) anime fan that loves it for the same reason I love films/TV.
You're welcome to your opinion too, but I don't think it's fair to trash an entire medium when many series in that medium are as well-written as the best shows America has produced.