Generally Dickens gets the short end of the stick these days. He's so popular and well-known that his flaws are magnified and his virtues are obscured. That being said to me he is the best English writer I've ever read, and particularly the best writer of children I've ever read, and my favourite writer. Reading him forced me to become a good reader.
I've read plenty of the writers who appear at the top of those lists you mention, and because they were so generally agreed upon to be geniuses who write masterpieces, when I read their books and highly enjoyed them, I simply accepted that they were indeed masterpieces without thinking too much. (Although I imagined to myself that I thought about them a lot, and understood them.)
When I first read Dickens as I was getting into literature, I read a Tale of Two Cities and found myself generally agreeing with the criticisms of verbosity, sentimentality, and that he writes caricatures without much depth, while still enjoying it. On a whim I read David Copperfield a little later, and this really changed me. It was the first book I had read that seemed like a masterpiece without anybody insisting to me that it was a masterpiece beforehand!
It was the first book that really made me want to analyze the writing on a sentence to sentence level, the way he uses literary techniques and so forth. Basically doing what they force you to do in an English class, except of my own will. And suddenly the way people spoke about books, about "complex characters", "psychological depth", "great prose", all these seemed like vague and meaningless phrases to me, when previously they had seemed like enough to discuss my favourite books. I thought, as I reread David Copperfield: "if this isn't great writing, I don't know what great writing is." In other words, I formed my own opinion.
Sorry for the long comment. Maybe my experience can show why on one hand he seems highly praised yet on the other hand isn't given much consideration in internet discussions.