I love the little 55mm yep it doesn't render as nice as some other lenses and a lot of that isn't just to do with the lens itself according to a review I read on it when I bought mine. The review said that as the lens is an older model now one thing they were looking at intensely at the time was in camera correction, and they went way overboard with this lens because they wanted to show what they can do, this meant that the lens lost a little bit of character you can't even switch of in camera corrections for this lens. Before anyone says that it doesn't affect raw files, it absolutely does according to that review and they went into that in a quite a lot of detail. They used some sort of software to extract the real raw file from the ARW file and there was quite a lot of difference between the 2.
The lens is clinical but that doesn't mean bad, it actually means technically great, it's one of the sharpest lenses in the system even now.
Personally I like mine, it's is very sharp, the a.f is nice and fast and it's very light weight and small. Something else I read somewhere about this lens was quite interesting as well apparently because of the 55mm focal length it has the same light transmission as a 50mm f/1.4. There was a complicated explanation for this I can't remember the details. But in basic terms it gathers the same amount of light as the Planar.