Also, the conventions of narrative flow are enculturated. What one generation finds smooth narrative may be disjointed to an older generation and pedantic to a younger generation. A multi-threaded movie like Nashville, The Godfather Part II, or even The Empire Strikes Back never would have been made in the 1930s, when people expected cinema to follow a single story in chronological order. Later films like the "backwards" Irreversible or the "backwards and forwards meeting in the middle" Memento or the Ourobouros structure of After the Rain or the in-and-out-of-dreamworld Mullholland Drive can be daunting even to modern moviegoers and would have been unintelligible fifty years ago. But those who are raised on a diet of this sort of narrative come to recongize its tropes and can decode them with practice.

So too in comic books or any other art form. The difference between "bad art" and "amazing envelope pushing art" is often not evident at the time, because both fail to follow the established conventions of "good art" for their day. Thus Bach and Van Gogh are far more celebrated today than during their lifetimes. And the opinions of established artists about their peers, while of some value, are hardly the end of the story, because those artists are as enmeshed in the old order as readers are.

I honestly didn't read any Batman (except Brave and the Bold, of course!) when researching this just because I don't have easy access.