Not ever having written a passable villanelle, I'm not sure I'm the person to answer this. But I think people keep trying in part because, if successful, they'll create a helluva poem. Think of the marvelous villanelles by Robinson, Kees, Thomas, Auden, Bishop and Roethke, and you'll see that it's worth making an attempt.
The problem, of course, is that it's hard to write a poem in English of 19 lines that uses only two rhymes, it's hard to make that poem build or change from stanza to stanza and come to a sense of culmination, and it's hard to write one line worth repeating, let alone two. So yes, most villanelles, even most published villanelles, are quite bad.
I also suspect that, like the sestina, the villanelle has become one of those forms that creative writing teachers assign because they think their kids can do it--hey, once you've got the refrains, look how few lines you've got left to write! But it won't work without emphatic meter, which takes much training these days, and it won't work without an intelligent appraisal of the strengths and limitations of the form itself.
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