This thing sure gets a lot of attention considering it had maybe three minutes of screen time.
I suspect it is because both the pilots, the mecha itself, it's history, its design (and so on) were way too interesting to only receive such a short amount of screen time. Hell, I would say that the Jaeger and its crew seemed much more interesting than the 2 main protagonists in the movie.
Additionally it was killed off way too quickly. It was a crew that had fought for the longest time in recorded history and survived, I don't think they would get caught and downed as easily as was shown in the movie if we take the actually backstory about the pilots and their experience into account.
Some would try to argue "They had never met these kind of Kaijus so of course they were unprepared" for which I say "Bollocks to that". The Cherno Alpha crew had been fighting increasingly tougher Kaijus that had been more and more fine tuned and altered to counter them specifically and Cherno Alpha. This means that the pilots would have to be exceptionally good at improvising in the heat of combat and reflexes to mirror that.
