The distinction I would make in agreeing with some of the other posters is there are designers out there that don"t "hate" games per se, but there are a lot of guys out there who aren"t passionate about the game they"re working on, or the genre they"re stuck in, or used to be big into gaming and drifted out of it after spending time in the industry.
I"ve seen it more than I expected - I work at a small shop and we"re all pretty passionate about our product, but we also do some contract work to pay bills. One of the first jobs I did for another studio really stunned me because of the general apathy about the game they were shipping. I got brought in late in the project to help them with some network code and overhead stuff like, "Hey, we should think about playing this online once it comes out" in a manner that suggested they hadn"t really even considered playing their own title until just then, like some kind of novelty.
It just felt really alien to me, but I can see how you"d get that way if you had to work on a bunch of projects you weren"t happy with or really invested in. The downside being that if you"re not very invested in your game, it"s just a job, you might be a good designer but you just won"t have the insight or desire to make the same caliber game someone who digs in and plays the shit out of their own title.
A good friend of mine works at a larger studio and feels like they"re really held back by 9-5"ers who aren"t really gamers (albeit those guys aren"t necessarily designers, as Curt pointed out) or who just want to follow some formula for more sales (see: most studios" design docs for a 3rd person shooter these days - add cover, over the shoulder cam, perks system +1 misc "unique" feature, sell!) instead of taking the role of the end-user and seeing what works and doesn"t just playing through it.