I won't get into a debate about who hates the French more as this isn't the place, but although the race in 7th Sea was very interesting, I didn't want to play them because of real world prejudice 
It's a shame you had such a mixed bag of players. I can understand the difficulty though. The game was designed to handle all kinds of players and was a very rich world... but it's not easy to create an adventure to suit all their tastes. It might have worked to tell them all to shut up and enjoy what they had, then provided a quest which involved brute force but rewards swashbuckling as well.
Mind you, since your players wanted more plot but complain that things were too complicated (they couldn't figure out the puzzles) or boring (they could figure out the puzzles) it sounds like there was no winning.
I don't blame you for stopping to play after that. I had a really bad time the first and only adventure I've run as a GM, when I tried to introduce three players to Judge Dredd. The mistakes I made were simple:
1) Tried my first time GMing with a world only I was intimitely familiar with, so I had to keep prodding them as there was no way they could/would figure things out in some cases.
2) One of the players I invited to join us was a long term GM who was very vocal, very argumentative, rules lawyer and didn't know how to be a player. He ruined the fun for everyone.
I've not played and certainly not attempted to run an RPG since.
Arabin
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(Sometimes I sit on accumulated culch for years knowing that it will be handy someday... someday.) Some toys can make very useful gaming figures. I started a thread here on that topic, and have picked up one or two gaming toys that others have come up with. McFarlane Dragons, the battleship you pictured, and toy trains all have gaming uses.
