Actually there's not very much to add to Mattygs' very good review. I found it quite appalling as well how corny the ceremony was. Having a low budget shouldn't mean that there's a kitschy and uninnovative concept.
And yes, the ceremony was much too wordy. The absolute lowpoint was Aimee Mullins' and Chantal Petitclerc's lengthy lecture about the origins of the Paralympic Games. Firstly, because these are things which every interested viewer could easily look up on the internet (or has probably already been told told by his TV commentators at that point), and secondly: A Paralympic (or Olympic) opening ceremony is a very inappropriate setting for a university lecture.
In this ceremony, I only had one "Wow" moment -- namely when Michaelle Jean was led into the stadium by those children holding her hand, and when she was included as a performer. But from that point, the ceremony went straightly downhill for me. Maybe also because our German TV commentators were very talkative during most parts of the ceremony, which created (together with the overall wordiness of the ceremony) the very annoying situation that almost everytime someone was talking or you couldn't even really hear what was said by the announcers or how the music sounded. Can't one simply shut up from time to time and let the segments speak for themselves? And that applies to both our German commentators and to the announcers and some of the performers at the opening ceremony. That "Oh, we must explain that in every explicit detail" (for example, having a sign language translator for the Canadian anthem -- who was, interestingly enough, never shown in a close-up in the international broadcast) almost came across like saying, "Oh, you viewers out there must be really mentally disabled".
Furthermore, the lighting of the cauldron was very underwhelming. The idea of having a ring of torch bearers was actually not bad, but it was poorly executed and rather anti-climatic (especially since those torch bearers weren't included in the actual lighting of the cauldron). The lonesome centre part of the original indoor cauldron looked poor. And the camera work was once more terrible (like during the extinguishing of the outdoor cauldron at the Olympic closing ceremony) -- the final torchbearer tipped his torch to the base of the cauldron, and when they cut to the whole cauldron, the flame was already fully ablaze. The lighting "mechanism" was also ludicrous. They didn't even try to pretend as if the flame travelled from the base of the cauldron to the top. That boy simply tipped his torch shortly to the base, and suddenly the cauldron was lit.
Overall, I was left with the impression that the organisers thought, "Well, these are only the Paralympics -- so give them a tiny budget and with that little money, create a very uninspiring, stale and sometimes even tacky opening ceremony". That said, I almost don't want to know what the closing ceremony will look like.