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I have to ask - seriously, this is - whether people who think fanfic writers "should just write original stories" actually think that people sit down at their desk/computer, thinking "I want to write" and then just force themselves to come up with a brand new original world, setting, plot and characters?
I'm sure some people do actually do that, but in my own experience (and in that of most of my friends, most of whom have written both fanfic and original stories) the idea comes first. Once you have got an idea - for a plot, for a world, for characters; anything, as long as there is that thought, that germ of something - then you start considering about writing it. If you have that germ of an idea, you can start working with it, building on it; if you don't have anything, you can't just force yourself to come up with something (well, you can, but why should you?).
If that idea is for an original story, with original characters, you write that story, with those characters. If it's an idea for a fanfic story that enters your brain, though - well, what can you do? You can either write it down and share it with other fans (provided the creator is either okay with it or has been dead long enough that it's fine) or you don't write it down. In neither case can you just sit down and write an original story instead, if that original idea isn't there but a fanfic idea is.
Oh, and of course there is a lot of bad fanfic. There's a lot of bad everything. There's also plenty of very good fanfic out there - thought-provoking, interesting, well-plotted and well-written. Fortunately, it's not as if anyone forces people to read fanfic.
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