I've met people who say it's one of their favorites. Which is bizarre to me. I don't think it worked well at all. Over time, I've found that people who read it in trade form liked it way more than people who read it in singles. That makes a little more sense to me.
Originally it wasn't an arc. It was a good deal shorter, and an over-sized story for the 50th Anniversary special. It was meant to be a done-in-one:
Peter has a science experiment go awry. A nerdy high school student on a field trip gets zapped by it. Everybody sees that kid's "origin story". When he gets his powers, he doesn't have to hide them. So he gets to do everything Peter wanted to do back when he had powers like that in high school. Peter feels responsible for what's happening to this kid-- and sees how he's becoming a bit of a jerk. So he takes the kid under his wing, trains him to be a super hero. But the kid rebels, uses his powers even more irresponsibly, people are put in immediate harm. Spidey has to save them-- and take the kid down-- a kid who has now started approaching Superman-levels and is out of Spidey's league. Spider-Man wins, uses science to take the kid's powers away, and then drops him back at his school where everyone is super-mean to him now because he really was a jerk when he did have those powers. The End.
That was what the story was supposed to be.
But then, for budget-y reasons, the size and scope of new original material that could be produced for the 50th Anniversary issue drastically changed. The Alpha story had to be shaved down to 20 to 22 pages in length. I said I couldn't fit all of that in 20 to 22 pages. The decision was made to spread the story out into a 2 or 3 issue arc, give it some room to breathe, and lean into the false tease that Spider-Man was actually getting his first official sidekick.
I made the argument that maybe we should just kill the story and come up with a new 50th anniversary angle. But time was running out. I didn't have any extra ideas that were that big or iconic at the moment. So we decided to stick with the altered plan as is. That was my biggest mistake. I should've been more assertive and killed it. That was all on me.
Before the story came out, there was already buzz about Spidey getting a side kick, how Spidey should never get a side kick, and how that new character was going to pull focus from Spidey on his 50th. Before page one even showed up in previews, the knives were out for this fictitious kid. And then he showed up and was already completely unlikable... which kinda was the point of him. In a done-in-one story where the kid gets his comeuppance, that's not a problem. But in a multi-part arc, where readers have weeks to stew about how much they hate him, and how he's clearly more powerful than Spidey, that's a huge problem.
Then, in the middle of the story, there was a new wrinkle. Sales for the 50th were huge. Good-or-bad there was a lot of buzz about Alpha. And it was decided to give him his own mini-series out of the Spider-Office. That meant that the ending of the story had to be knee-capped. Peter couldn't take Alpha's powers away completely. Which kinda defeated the purpose and intent of telling the story in the first place.
Also-- and again, this one's ALL on me-- I botched the middle chapter. Instead of making it a clean 3 issue arc, I tried to make them more like 3 done-in-ones, and made the middle chapter a Spidey/Alpha/Jackal story. That fed into the narrative that this kid was Spidey's side kick and some kind of recurring character.
Basically, I think it was a story that could've had potential if it stuck to its original format-- but then it got a little out of control when it ballooned out into a 3 issue arc and was played out over a number of months-- instead of what should have been one sitting. The blame for that is on me-- with ANY story, if you see it's not going the way you would like, you ALWAYS have the option to kill it or just-not-do-it. Same kinda thing happened to JMS on Sins Past. I should have hit the kill switch. (Marketing, altering story's length, and even the company's need to change an ending are things you have to be prepared for when working on a licensed property. That's all part of the game. And if you can't deal with stuff like that, you shouldn't be writing licensed comics. Understanding that is important. Blaming that process is pointless. You might as well be complaining about the weather. It ain't gonna help. Things happen like that, good-or-bad, all the time in comics.)