Beware the Batman looks interesting. How bad is it?

Gotta agree there. An anime episode is only, on average, 21 minutes long, but when you do 2 minutes for the intro, then two minutes for the ending, thirty seconds for midway transition and another 30 seconds or so for the preview, you cut down the show to only about 16 minutes long. Heck, half of them also use a good minute or so to recap the previous episode.

~SE++

Hoi, that statistic is blatantly false.
Anyway, most OPs seem to last for 1 and a half minute, I think it's the standard.

Thing in OPs that bother me basically boils down to spoilers and bad music, and I can just skip it if it's the latter.

Starting up two new ones for me: Attack on Titan & Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni (When They Cry).

AoT started out attacky, then spent the next two episodes being kind of meh. It gets better I hope? At least more attacky?

WTC I grabbed on mention of a creepy horror type deal in some rpg.net thread. Started off surprisingly cheery. I know they're establishing characters, but not what I expected. Then, about halfway through, it divebombs creepy before pulling up a bit into cheery & then ending more creepy. Looks to be interesting.

AoT is known for pretty fluctuating pacing.

Attack on Titan is the mech anime nobody asked for intersperese within an actually good anime that is going "Why the heck do we have to share air time with THAT?"

Seriously. If they had just stuck to the gear fighting the anime would have worked well. But no. This is the anime that made me very very glad I have stopped watching toonami already.

Not too bad.

I seem to be the only one who doesn't mind the AoT thing too much.
Then again, I only liked the series for "Short Blade".

So. Can an anime be good without much of a plot? If so, how?

Of course it can - usually mostly around artistic merit or sheer entertainment value. Slice-of-life anime are insanely popular despite the fact that for the most part they don't really have a plot. Just 'something happens, we react to it' wash, rinse, repeat.

Another example is most of your shonen battle mange (bleach, naruto, BDZ etc). While there is an plot it's little more than a excuse to get people into fights.

If you wanted to accuse a show of not having a plot, something like FLCL would be a lot closer than Bleach.

Let me rephrase that a little: a plot that isn't contiguous and/or is really hard to follow.

After about the first arch and a half Bleach doesn't have a plot;

New Villain Appears > Lose to Villain > Train > Kick Villains Teeth in

Isn't plot. It's the central premise of most action anime. Yeah you can dress it up nice and pretend things are going on behind the scenes but it's all just window dressing for the oncoming sword fight.

Sure. Just take Evangelion. Most people have no idea what's actually going on.
First episode of Kyousougiga is also terrific.

Sure. I loved Serial Experiment Lain and Boogiepop Phantom.

~SE++

And for Dragon Ball its :

New Villain Appears > Talk About How This Is The Most Baddest Villain Ever For Ten Episodes > Fight Villain For 5 Epdisodes > Lose to Villain > Someone Else Shows Up > Scream Loudly For 10 Episodes > New Person Loses To Villain > More Screaming > First Guy Finally Kills Villain Even Though He Got Wrecked Earlier

I like slice of life, and they don't always have an overarching plot line.
Kimi to Boku comes to mind.

Almost every 4koma comedy.
Almost every SoL.
Dog Days'

Man, now that people are pointing it out, there is a LOT of anime with little to no plot to it.

~SE++

And yet they do just fine for the most part.

Oh man Aldnoah.Zero has me so hyped. Cinematic music with female singers never fails to disappoint, even when Star Driver did it for 10+ episodes consecutively. (The show still sucked though.)

On the Attack on Titan talk, I hadn't watched an Anime series in a long time, probably since like high school, and I had heard a lot of buzz about it so I gave it a try. I thought the concept had a lot of promise but I was let down by it overall. The characters are very cliche and have little to no growth and slot into very Japanese understanding of personalities that I just can't relate to. I could forgive some of the characters being bad but the story got more and more ridiculous over time and after the first season it didn't make me excited for another one coming. Maybe I'm just not the right audience but I didn't find it very enjoyable.