I might give it another chance eventually. I still own it, and I was kinda planning on trying to force myself through it sometime so I could move on to other works llike Cryptonomicon (the first book of his to catch my interest, mostly because of the title and the faux-worn look of the pages). However, I still have 6 Philip K. Dick novels left to read that my ex-roommate left me, and those in general are much more interesting (even though they're more sci-fi reality mindfucks than dystopian). The PKD novels I've liked the best so far are Ubik, Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and We Can Build You. Solar Lottery is actually somewhat dystopian, in as much that the world is run by a dictator who is chosen at random out of all the people in the country (might be world in this one) by a computer, and can legally be challenged and killed by rivals, or he can be ousted of at any time when the computer decides to chose someone new, but it focuses more on the story of the previous guy doing whatever he can to get back into power than on the nature of a society run in this way.
And I'm a writer also (not published yet, except for some old high school essay on water conservation in some local journal), but I'm not jealous of the guy. I can see why the book is popular (it's a geek's wet dream, basically), I just couldn't get into it.
The only write I could say I'm jealous of is Dan Brown, and only because I can't believe such a crappy writer could be a bestseller.