I've been watching some old (Troughton & Pertwee) DW lately and while they ended on a cliffhanger each week (many of which turned into total fake-outs!) the stories mostly progressed linearly and what you learned one week was relevant the next and so on.

Things are certainly different now, and I don't object to the format of "let's do this and then leave it to stew for a few weeks before we pick it up again" - Fringe is doing that brilliantly as have other shows. Fringe is also quite complex in its overall storyling and has been developing its own mythology for the last three seasons, and that hasn't put me off.
So I can't work out what it is about DW as it is now that means that it's harder for me to swallow.
Unless its that Fringe manages to make sense (within its own premise) and doesn't dick around with the viewers to quite the same extent.