I also think our perception of Jester is pretty coloured by our tendency to play 2-player games. It scales up a lot differently with more players, sorta like thief and pirate ship, and it's obviously better the more players there are, as there's more good stuff you can get.
I played a 5p live game with Jester a few weeks ago and I didn't really see too much of a difference in terms of how it played -- almost everyone had one or two, and most of the time it was played, we handed out coppers, occasionally a curse (Remake was on the board, though), and there were a bunch of AP decisions (give my opponent another Remake, or take my first one? Give him a second silver, or my third? etc.).
The biggest difference we noticed is that Jester ends the game FAST. Especially in the presence of strong trashing like Remake -- I think that game lasted like 10 turns, and the winner had 11 points, with one or maybe two provinces purchased total. And unlike other 3-pile accelerators, it's hard to control when the game ends, because your Jester might hit 4 of the same card to end the game, or it might miss all of a single card that you don't have enough to purchase.
(Worth mentioning that that group is not all experts -- if I had to guess I'd say they are probably the equivalent of level 30, 25, 20, 10, 10, something like that.)
) and an estate.