I'm already desensitized, I don't even blink when the Antagonist appears. Fighting him means zero fun, of course. I don't find fun in repetitive games like all the "Call of Battlefield" out there. If my team is good, we destroy him without passion. If the team is bad, I just wait for death, sighing. I hate all this Antagonist thing, the game is perfect without him... but developers love the idea. We can't do anything about this.
They can perfectly do an enemy that could be the Antagonist, controlled by the IA, or a boss, but no, they prefer the "trolling" part. As you say, the Antagonist literally destroys all the possible new players-fans. The community of this game could have been much bigger with more cooperative adventure and less "4 versus 1" nonsense.
That's my opinion.