I'm perfectly capable of digging music outside of my comfort zone, and I keep getting the feeling that the dude's got some musical talent hidden away somewhere within him, but that was shit.
Kanye West is a genius producer and beatmaker whose style greatly changed the sound of mainstream rap away from the gangster rap style of the 90s to the more musical, "neo soul" and lyrically broad style of the 00s and beyond. Before he was a rapper he was responsible for the instrumentals of some of the most influential rap music at the turn of the millennium. Some notable early works as a producer/beatmaker:
Jay Z - Izzo (H.O.V.A)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI4tS1lgqCsJay Z - Encore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYBYkJMrBt4His first big break as a solo artist was in 2004 with The College Dropout, which is widely considered to be a landmark rap album.
He not only wrote and performed the whole album, but he also produced it. This is still my favorite Kanye album:
Kanye West - All Falls Down
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMAjqw9HF_oSince, Kanye's gone on to write, record, perform, and produce 8 solo albums while also continuing to produce dozens of albums and hundreds of songs for top rap artists. There is no one in rap who is anywhere near as influential to the genre as Kanye West - the 2nd most influential person in the scene would register as a dot in Kanye's rearview mirror.
So, in short, I really don't give a shit of people don't like Kanye West's music, or don't like rap in general. I personally only like his first 3 solo albums, and scattered songs after that. And Kanye is definitely an asshole in public. But people who just dismiss him as being unintelligent, lazy, and arrogant are obviously not very informed, and probably don't want to be informed, and thus are the very things they accuse Kanye West of being.