When I started out watching and collecting animes, I always got the dubs, but when I finally watched one in sub (Cardcaptor Sakura was my first Sub), I regreted buying all my previous anime in dub.
I'm not exactly anti-english, I'm just tired of the lack of spirit and effort that most americans give to making an anime (or any other foriegn material) at least as good as the original. (I'm also a little annoyed by how americans always think they can make anything better than the original. This shows up in a bunch of Book-to-Movies and Game-to-Movies too) But they are getting better. It'll just be a little longer before we hear a sudden break-through in all english dubbed voice acting. Then they'll all sound great. But for now, more than half of the english dubs are sounding at least good. So that's cool. And they weren't all too bad in the past. I think that most of the english voice acting in animes like Ruin Explorers and Socerer Hunters was Ok. And they're kinda old. Ok, maybe only 4 or 5 years, but still.
And what about name changing? This can get pretty bad too. Let me show a small list of name changes from the Japanese Cardcaptor Sakura to the american Cardcaptors.
Japanese / American
Sakura Kinamoto /
Sakura Avalon
Tomoyo Daidouji /
Madison Taylors
Shaoran Li /
Li Shaoran
Yuki /
Julian
Toya Kinamoto /
Tori Avalon
Clow Cards (Pronouced like "Glow") /
Clow Cards (Pronounced like "Cow")
It's kind of weird why you would want to change the names so bad. This is also true for Sailor Moon. Even non-prime time animes do this. Like, Legend of Crystania The Motion Picture. Ok, I guess companies wanna take Dubbing a step further than just simply translating and re-recording. But do they really have to amercanize the names? Can't they get a little more creative? The pronounciation also gets weird. Sakura in Japanese is like, "Sah - Koo - Ra". In american, it becomes "Sa - Cure - Uh". Not that it's bad, but just weird, I guess. Oh uh, nevermind.
Maybe we should try to look at this with this idea also: If you knew both English and Japanese languages fully, which language would you watch your animes in? Cause with DVDs, you can turn off the subtitles, so they're not so distracting.