Draco In Leather Pants

It's not what you think. ^_~

TV Tropes has an entry called "Draco in Leather Pants", which describes the phenomenon in which fans embrace a character that's supposed to be unlovable, perhaps downplaying their (often glaringly obvious by design) faults to do so. TV Tropes has various theories on this (which leads me to remark that the site has an overall attitude I don't care for, BTW), but they don't include one that I think contributes to at least some cases:

Poor original writing.

Draco's a good example of this, especially when Rowling complains about his following because "he's not a nice man."
I'd say most of the Draco fandom was established sometime during books 1 thru 5. Looking at those alone, what do we see of Draco? Yes, he's a mean kid. He's a thorn in our heroes' side, but not a real villain.
We've seen him with his father twice. The first time Lucius was nitpicking just about everything he did (Book 2); the second Lucius was basically ignoring him so that he could heckle Arthur Weasley, but had bought him the best tickets to the sporting event of the year (book 4).
We've seen him with his mother once (book 4), and she was basically looking down at everything and annoyed to be there.

A passive reader will just take Rowling's "he's mean" and leave it. But fandoms aren't made of passive readers. So instead, let's get into this kid's head for a minute and run around. What do we find in here?
Well, we find a kid from a cold, critical, and terribly racist family. He's spoiled materially, but he doesn't get a lot of affection. Like all kids, he wants his family's approval on at least some level. He's been completely sheltered from the race his father despises, and so has no basis for comparison other than what he's been taught. He doesn't have any real friends. Oh, he has plenty of hangers-on, but on some level you gotta figure even he knows it's because of his family's money and power.
What you've got here is a sad, pathetic, insecure, lonely little boy lashing out in a desperate attempt to get someone to actually give a damn about him. Gosh, I wanna go huggle him now. I'm not going to hate a kid like that. I'm going to hate his actions, and I'm going to think he's an annoying little prick, but as a human being he is a sympathetic character if you bother to look.

If Rowling didn't want that, she did a poor job of thinking out the character.