The great disappointment I find about republicans is the absence of an intellectual approach to what they believe.  This is in stark contrast to the clarity of what they invariably say and want: get rid of the Royal Family.  This is entirely consistent with Republicans and Republican movements that leap out from history, the best examples being Oliver Cromwell, and the French revolution respectively.  However it is a philosophical dead end.  

First, there is confusion between the Royal Family and an hereditary monarchy. It is one of those distinctions that seems subtle or even semantic at first but once realised it is impossible to ignore.  It the same as mistaking a job with the person who does that job. Confusing the job or office with the person or people who hold it undoubtedly undermines the clarity of the republican argument.  Historically, there is evidence for an understanding of this distinction with the hereditary monarchy in Britain, with unpopular Kings either being left to rot and replaced (James II), or done away with and replaced (Edward II, and Charles II, albeit after a pause).  So, not only is there a reasonable basis but there is also precedent for approaching the two separately.  From my perspective, when republicans fail to make the
distinction, it sounds as though they hold an aesthetic dislike of the people involved, and are blinded by this.

Second is a positive-negative problem.  It is of course fashionable to be positive and forward-looking and all that guff.  ‘I’ has a place in the modern way of dealing with people and managing organisations as it seems to have done in eighteen-century British manners, though with rather different words.  However this polarity in intellectual argument is by far the most serious thing to undermine the republican perspective we hear about. They want to ‘get rid of the Royal family’.  Even popular references and information sources on this state it as such.  The Wikipedia page is a good example, and although this is weakened intellectually by the fact that anyone can change it, the fact is, it is the first sentence and no-one has.  In this particular case, the description has a hurried bit at the end about having non-hereditary monarchy, but even there, the wince-makingly negative stance remains.  This movement seeks to not do something. 

You may be nursing the thought that this is some sort of pseudo-royalist argument, calculated to undermine its opposition.  As it happens I do like the hereditary monarchy we have in Britain, but that is because it performs a constitutional role that I believe is important.  Of course it is not the only way of having a monarch, but whichever vehicle it is, it must be balanced by the rest of the system in which it operates.  This is rather the nub of the problem with Republican ideology: it is based on a negative.  It seems that if they wanted to, they could put forward a plan for the governance of a state that did not include an hereditary monarchy, it might well be intellectually sound.  Not only that, it might include something novel.  A shared presidency could be part of it, or as a dear old friend suggested she might like, no monarchy at all.  Her argument was that the proliferation of mass communication means that a centralising figure is no longer as important as it once was. This alone produces a mass of questions, debates and arguments on the subject, with scope for much intellectual depth.  Republicans, almost just by identifying themselves as that, count themselves out of intellectual debate on the subject at present.  Sadly.