That's fair. Technically there's probably very little one can complain much about with Spielberg (except maybe he's not terribly audacious or wildly creative as a film maker), I just find his sensibilities to be so middle of the road it's unbearably stifling. Like Amistad and the color purple, slavery was bad, preaching to the choir when we got it a long time ago. Jaws and Poltergiest, sharks and ghosts are scary. Close encounters and E.T., kids are cute but aliens are a little scary and mysterious, but ultimately benign, and so on. Do you get the drift?

He's pushing no narrative or thematic envelopes with any of his plots, themes and characters. All his characters are kind of bland and uninteresting outside of the action they find themselves in, and he doesn't seem to know how and that the stories he's telling should naturally tie them together. Catch me if you can is following Leo on amusingly theatrical hijacks (don't get me start on him, one at a time). I don't think he's ever had a non cartoon villain. He seems competent enough with pulp and childish stuff like animation, but he seems entirely out of his depth with adult drama. No doubt you're going to object, what about Munich, Lincoln and so on. That just gets back to right down the middle of the road. Lincoln is a beloved, mythologized figure second only maybe to Washington, and Steven did nothing dramatic to contradict that, so it interests few and offends fewer except racists. Sure he had some shady guys buy votes, but it was still a generic nail biting last minute legal win (yawn), with predictably maudlin dialogue and speeches (more yawn). If it had any touches of brilliance, it's hard to see how they were anyones but Day Lewises. I'll give him credit, he knows decent casting directors.

Take Indiana Jones for another example, if he's not hunting antiquities, fighting and running about, he's dull as dishwater (actually he was good character in Raiders, a man trying to balance brain and brawn, but that was quickly left behind). He's singularly awkward and uninteresting when he's 'developing' in the fourth film with an ex and the sudden revelation they had a son. To a competent film maker, that could have been 'I am your father' levels of drama, but not Steven. Now you might blame the writers, and that's fair, but other film makers seem to choose to collaborate with better writers or write with better taste themselves. Heck Cameron was better at writing action characters in Titanic and Avatar. Look how mediocre he seems to be when he's trying for more than simple pulpy action (people being chased by Dinosaurs say) with a film like Artificial Intelligence. It's like he never really understood quite what to do with David to catch the audience interest and make them care in the slightest. There's almost nothing memorably about that film. Brian Aldiss is no slouch, so one might reasonably conclude Steven didn't fully understand or had no clue how to adapt his writing to the screen unlike say a Villeneuve, who accomplished far more along the same lines with Bladerunner 2049, with one hand behind his back, constrained to being a sequel. Did he even read it? Maybe he's like Eastwood, and has had teams doing most of his work for decades, and just slaps his name all over their final product. Beside just resting on his laurels, that seems to be the best theory to me to account for the drastic decline in just entertainment value of his films since the eighties, if BFG and Ready Player One and multiple tired sequels are any indication. He seems to have lost his touch a decades or more ago.