Not nick-picking at all, but claymation is when they create the illusion of movement by manipulating "soft" clay for each frame (think Wallace and Gromit). What Laika does is stop motion, where they re-position "hard" figures between frames. Although technically claymation is also stop motion.
But I completely agree with what you said. I thought that Coraline was fantastic (big fan of the novel, too) and I wanted to love Paranorman so much but it didn't click. I liked it enough, but didn't have the desire to watch it since it came out, and that's never a good sign. Haven't seen Boxtrolls yet, again, not a great sign that it didn't have enough drawing power to bring ME in the theaters, because I'm a fan of this type of animation, and Nightmare Before Christmas will always be near and dear to my heart.
Hopefully it will be successful enough for them to keep afloat and keep making more movies, I do LOVE having a stop motion studio around, they just need to tighten up on their screenwriting.