I don't know which reviews did You read about Kobo but "bad" is not what the majority of owner of a Kobo think. Of course the perfect reader doesn't exist but I like it. The only thing I don't like is that Kobo Epub doesn't handle ligatures, but You can choose epub if there aren't notes or images (and if You use KOReader it doesn't matter).
In this post I compared Kindle and Kobo:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...98#post3926698
And if You search You can find many other things about Kobo.