Okay, okay, we're being really mean, which is my fault because I started it. Which is bad of me, because I'm always whining about others not accepting alternate views as equally valid in discussions about authors.
The remarks you received at the website are indeed equally valid to mine own. (I was just trying to cheer you up by joking about rank.) They are honest reactions, and if a person found the story fragmentary and confusing, well, it is a deliberately fragmentary style meant to portray chaos, and the person has a perfect right to say how the story seemed to him.
Which is the difficulty of written fiction and getting feedback and assessment of it. Even if you win the Mann Booker prize, the U.S. NBA, the Nebula and the Hugo, there will be huge swathes of your audience who think your book is drivel. And those negative reactions during the process can be possibly very helpful. But they require some interpretation and filtering, because people don't like certain things and types of stories (preferences,) people often have assumptions about what does or does not have to be in a story that color their feedback, and people when they are not engaged by a narrative often are not really paying much attention to what's in it.
So let's look at the comments again without the very unfair tag of idiot.
"there is some merit, but so far it's lost in fragmented rambling" -- did not like the style, found it confusing. This might be a flag to make sure there are enough clarifiers worked in -- a topic that came up here too. But it's mostly a preference comment about the style, the goal of which the person either didn't like or didn't get. The person was not engaged. So somewhat helpful.
"you need a much stronger hook" -- did not get the premise of the narrative or didn't like it. Felt a man hanging in barbed wire in a war zone waiting to die and witnessing a murder was not dramatic enough. Or maybe prefers immediate fantasy action. So not particularly helpful.
"you need to clarify your characters - there are too many and most of them are marginally different from the others" -- there are only a handful of characters, so this remark confused most of us. The characters are also very different from each other. However, this may be related to the voices the Captain hears, which only become clear entities gradually. Maybe another flag to make sure Albert and his companion are a little more clearly specified earlier on, less hallucinatory perhaps. A revision issue up for debate. (Though I would side with what you already have myself.) Tiny bit helpful.
"you need to do a lot of reviewing of punctuation and how to form sentences" -- did not get what you were doing with the style, is not perhaps very familiar with literary stylistic techniques, has probably been told that fiction authors should not use sentence fragments, when in actuality most authors constantly use sentence fragments as a stylistic device. A style preference and not at all helpful. (But a perfectly valid reaction to a style the person doesn't find engaging.)
"Work on it some more and see if you can get it into a more presentable form" -- Again, does not seem to have figured out what you are doing stylistically or doesn't like that sort of style. "presentable form" means nothing definite, so the advice is not helpful.
If the rest of the comments from that site are in a similar vein, then the amount of useful feedback you can get from it is very limited. The comments are not specific enough (see how Sean Wright's is rather more detailed and thus gives you a specific reaction to a particular aspect,) and can give you only a hazy indication of possible problems.
All of the comments you get, here and elsewhere, general or specific, are for later, for revision. Not for the writing process, unless there's a plot issue you feel needs to be unravelled before you can go forward. So keep 'em, store 'em, and when you're all done with the draft or nearly so, then all our little comments come into play.
The important thing to remember is that none of the comments, be they positive or negative, general or specific, are compliments or a kick in the teeth. They're fodder. You're using them to get the story the way you want it to be. If you're losing sight of that idea, then you may need to stop getting feedback on the draft. (There are many authors who let no one see their first drafts for this very reason.) And this goes for all our fine friends who are seeking critiques in this forum.
If you decide that you don't want to pursue the story, or life decides that for you, we will of course live with it. I'm sure there will be some sulking, but it's up to you.
