BoxRec

He supposedly made some negative comments about the scoring of Chris John vs JMM and it turned out he hadn't seen the fight. I'm not sure why else people hate on him on. Maybe they just don't like his personality. And his weight really makes him an easy target.

That was a good list he wrote for 2015.
I'd add Gonzalez vs Mares II
Rigo in a unification fight(s)
Khan vs Brook
Hernandez vs Huck (Inb4 'that's a pipe dream!')

Dan has 4-5 decent picks.

Why does he seem to pretend there is no boxing in Asia? There's not a wish that pertains to the orient, none of his prospects of the year list included a fighter from the Orient and not a round, Fighter or Fight came from over there. His sole links there were 2 Ltd from Macau and the Takayama was from Japan...

He also made some very negative comments about boxrec and it's users a while back. And he is apparently very arrogant and disparaging of others in his chatroom/forums. Also, he sucks at scoring fights and his opinions are often questionable. Basically, he is a haughty prick with no real reason to be. He's a great reporter and he always has great scoops before anyone else, but he's a jerk.

for some reason that is unbeknownst to me

When Chris John defeated JMM, Fat Dan reported in detail about how it was a horrible robbery and called shenanigans on the judging. Then, as it turned out, he hadn't even seen a minute of the fight when he made that claim.
It was a much, much closer fight then what Dan reported blindly.
As a professional 'reporter' of anything specific, an ethical approach would be to actually look at evidence, in this case, the fight, before making a crazy accusation from the ESPN platform.
He'll always be a scrub to me now, and I'll always doubt his word.

Just to be clear, I’m not calling you a liar or personally attacking you, but I wouldn’t mind actually reading Dan Rafael’s own words so that I can judge for myself if he had acted improperly or not… as I don’t like to hold lemming-like opinions that are founded on nothing but baseless rumours!

No worries, I have no desire to spread my dislike for Fat Dan. Not enough to hunt up links, anyways.
Whether anyone believes me or no, I remember believing his report of robbery and being upset that one my favs was dumb enough to play a road game like that for peanuts, and when I finally watched the fight and wondered "wtf was Dan watching?".
Later on when asked about "the robbery that wasn't" in one of his espn chat-room sessions, he admitted to reporting what he had heard, not what he saw for himself.
Mind you, he didn't report that he had heard that JMM got robbed. He reported it as fact.

I'm sure there are some mentions of it out there should you look around google a little bit.
For most though, it's no big deal and I certainly don't begrudge anyone who likes him. There are so few major outlet boxing reporters that I can admit I still read his crap. Now I just look at it all sideways, from the first line to the last.

He is a complete asshole, one look at his tweets is enough to see that. However he is a good writer, one of the better boxing writers today.

Therefore, due to the fact that the Chris John versus Juan Manuel Marquez fight actually took place almost nine years ago, coupled with the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any actual evidence whatsoever to support allegations of Dan Rafael’s so-called horrifically-hypocritical comments, then I have to assume that all this negativity surrounding him is merely based on nothing but idle rumour, because there are bound to be some people that hold a subconscious biased against him due to his unattractive appearance (and I don't mean you when I say that).

Fair enough.
I was simply giving my personal reason for not liking him.
I read his report at the time of said fight, and later on I read his chat-room brush-off response, whereas you are just hearing it from me.
Like I said, it doesn't matter to me one way or the other who likes Fat Dan.
That's simply why I personally don't, because you mentioned not knowing why it seems like people don't like him.