I don't dislike them, really.  And the second option indeed looks better to me.  It's again a very personal thing - sometimes my mind intuitively tries to avoid intermediate vars, cause:
1) need to find a good name for it - and sometimes it's hard (for me)
2) when looking through the unfamiliar code - my mind can easily ignore `if` statements when they are not related to what I'm looking at/debugging, but it often stumbles upon variables - and tries to think where else they can be used.
(and to summarize - it's probably of my lazyness)

So, I think it depends on situation - so, if you find that usage of intermediate var helps to understand the logic - we should use it - if not, we don't need it then :)