I think the Forbes article hit a lot of the points but missed a few others:
1) Unlike TWD which mostly, but not always, kept its shows tightly to the "logic" of the zombie apocalypse, FTWD just makes stupid skips that are "unrealistic" even by ZA Logic and sloppy. In other words, they don't dot the I's and cross the T's. They let walkers (er, infected, wasteds) get up and walk after falling several stories from balconies. They let a ballroom full of wedding guests get locked in the ball room for weeks (has to be at least a couple of weeks) and there's no bloody corpses, blood -- even the wedding cake is intact and the dead Bride's Mom looks like she just arrived). Back at Colonia, they "feed" a man to the walkers surrounding the colony (a good defensive tactic) as they apparently do all the time, but there are no skeletons, bloody or otherwise and they call it re-inforcing the wall. Unless they mean making the zombies stronger by feeding them, having sick people get eaten does not add to the zombie man power). There has not been a single episode that these kind of glaring "dumb" things haven't filled the show.
2) They have a heroin addict as the lead character -- an addict who stole morphine from a man dying of a heart attack, who has tried to steal drugs from every place his family goes. Yes, he has some redeeming character traits but he is not trust-worthy. He abandoned his family to walk with the "Dead", now he's hooked up with a Mexican version of a Jim Jones' community. Among his few saving graces are that Strand, who is a great character likes him and sees something in him. But that's not quite to answer the question of who wants to watch this train wreck of a young man destroy others, and maybe himself, in the process? po
3) None of the characters, with the possible exception of Strand, have the charisma or leadership to carry the show. So now, it's just a series of either bottle episodes or bounce from one not particularly interesting character to another --- in an environment of Mexican cartels all too like the news we see all the time, without a Zombie Apocolapsyse.
Bottom line - I don't much carry whether any of the characters live or die -- (except Strand). I'm guessing that's pretty much true of the watching audience. There's nothing wrong with them being flawed --- they're just too flawed to enjoy or root for.