For all that they are lovely looking men, I found the men's singles very unsatisfying to watch. The importance of point-scoring elements, changes of direction, changes of speed, using different parts of the blade, blah blah, means that the choreography is struggling to retain any sense coherence and flow. The compromise struck between figure skating as dance and as sport seems mostly unhappy and unbeautiful to me. Whilst dancing like a cat on a hot tin roof takes a lot of skill, it mostly looks, as you so vividly put it, like someone dancing around horrible hairy spiders.