As Sptrawler once advised me, keep knocking and sooner or later something will give. As another wise guy with a couple billion dollars more than Homer, Ray Kroc said in his book, and also in a pretty good movie about him - The Founder, starring Batman: the key to success is persistence.
When people say that you're trying to get rich quick, they're probably dismissing your ideas and your ability more than saying that you're trying to get rich quick. It's a polite way of saying you're an idiot (or a dreamer, same difference).
As to the getting rich quick schemes, most people are head deep in it. Just they don't realise or want to see that they are.
To get rich quick is not conning people or have some wild, unusual ideas - there's only so many idiots you can con, and you'd be caught by the law or meet a few who got a few bucks left to hire some goon to give you a visit. As to the unusual ideas... well you're on your own with that one.
To get rich quickly, and safely, is to go and get a job, settle on a profession, real quick. Right out of school quick.
That's most of the people of the world. Not trying to belittle or put that down, but it is a heck of a lot easier to make stable income, get proper finances, get regular recognition, stability in relationship, start a family and able to provide for the kids with a proper job and title, doing it early and mastering it soon after. That's getting rich a whole lot quicker than going down any unconventional, unusual, path.
Going down that road less travel is what the polite people would call getting rich quick. Again, short hand for "he's an idiot with no hope thinking he'll make it rich... what a try hard".
So it's safer, getting rich a whole lot quicker, by sticking to the recognised profession and career ladder. What are those recognised professions? Ask your mother in law or the local bank manager.
For people with lots of ideas and no regular job... the path to riches is long and winding, full of alone time and a whole bunch of headaches and heartaches. Then one day he might become an overnight success, or just one of those guys most see as failures.
Drunken philosophising aside... to the Annual Reports...
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Annual reports should only be read when you want to know about the business in detail.
For most companies, you do not need to know its business in details to know its business. You just read those free financial metrics on Google, Yahoo or MorningStar, and that's more than enough to gauge whether you ought to know more.
If yes, I'd read and watch the result presentations to get an overview. If it still look interesting after that then crack open the Annual Report, turn to the financial statements, put it into DangInvestor's quickKPI module
and within five minutes you'd be able to know if you ought to go further.
If you need to, then I'd go over the latest AR, starting with its its commentaries, scanning through its business and operations, read through its notes... then work my way back to maybe 5 years or whenever best represent the company's current state of affairs.
Sometime it might b worthwhile to analyse management's pay etc., but you usually know enough about management from the company's performance. And if you'd only buy at a big discount, and with limited capital base to make it wortwhile... just understanding the business and its financials in some details ought to suffice.
In short, open the AR only when you want to know the business in details. The preliminaries you can know from other sources.
What this mean is that there will be some great and coming businesses that you might miss; some that's just about to turn their operations around and have the wind behind its back etc.... but you can't win them all.
To do that, you'd then need to really go deep and read through a bunch of presentations and reports from A to Z; probably starts with those in industry you are familiar with first.