I love animation of all sorts, whether it's cutting edge CG or the traditional hand drawn style, but Avatar left me cold. No matter how talented the artists might be, if they don't have a good story to tell, their efforts will fall flat.

That seems to me to be Avatar's great shortcoming. The plot was just another dose of the sort of hackneyed social commentary that seems to dominate so much art theses days. The human characters were grossly simplistic stereotypes, out to rape mother nature and commit genocide against a superior species without a trace of remorse.
Okay, I get it already. Perhaps one human in a million deserves to live, while the rest of us murderous slobs deserve death,  preferably a slow one with lots of suffering.

Beowulf's characters and story were much more compelling, which made it far superior to Avatar in spite of its less polished look.