Most of these writers can write engaging characters (not so sure about Crichton, he would be my pick for "overrated"), but only do so when it's relevant.
Would definitely agree re: Crichton. He's at his best when quickly sketching characters with simple motivations in difficult situations, particularly survival. Every time he's tried to write more complex or nuanced characters it's just ended up with them being unpleasant people with either implausible or stereotypical backstories (or both!), and often projecting some very questionable views (verging on the conspiratorial at times).
The trouble with having subtext is it can be easily missed. How many people watched the movie version of Starship Troopers and thought the humans were the good guys?
Fewer than the novel?
Also, I think people today are better at detecting undercurrents and subtext in movies than a lot of people were in the 1990s, even though today fewer people seem to be literate in the language of cinema. Maybe just the proliferation of memes, trolling, internet videos and so on, so many of them ironic/sarcastic that has keyed people to recognise Starship Troopers for what it was - essentially an elaborate troll. Whereas in the 1990s, you basically had to have seen propaganda movies to understand what Verhoeven was trying to convey - I think a lot of people got a sense that "something was off", but couldn't exactly place it. I remember, when I saw it at the cinema with my brother and a friend, we came out and me and my brother are laughing (having watched countless propaganda movies, hell at that point we'd even made ironic ones back with Stunt Island's moviemaker!), but our friend, who is a very intelligent guy, but has never seen a propaganda movie a day in his life was like "What's this movie actually trying to say? Are we supposed to take it seriously or not?" - so he knew something was wrong, but didn't quite get it.
With the novel, which is just an amazing mess of wildly contradictory political messaging, borderline accidental BDSM fetish stuff (a classic often seen in SF and fantasy - I'll take intentional BDSM fetish over accidental any day of the week), confused ideas about how such a society could even function (which Heinlein later tried, rather unsuccessfully, to retcon), and the most gung-ho and frankly pretty racist bollocks possible (you can't be calling humanoid aliens "skinnies" and directly advocating for their genocide then when the US is engaging in wars in Asia with
very similar racist terms for Asian people, especially not with the long-term "Oriental Horde" racism going on, especially given the implied "solution" (ahem) to the "Oriental Horde" was always "regretful genocide"*), I find it amazing anyone could see the humans as "good guys", but I think more people manage it than the books. It takes a really wild "I believe everything these humans are saying, even though they contradict themselves multiple times!" attitude. I've rarely seen a book undermine it's own thesis as effectively - and certainly never seen one where it was unintentional.
(The only recent SF book I've seen really wreck it's own thesis was
Leech, which is a novel with a totally wild and cool vibe and ideas, but tries to draw a
direct moral equivalence between an entity which essentially possesses a few hundred people planetwide - admittedly not fully informed volunteers - and uses them to improve the lives of billions, and has no greater goal than that (not even self-preservation, really), with an entity which seeks to violently dominate and destroy literally
all life but itself. And it's like, nah mate. Those aren't the same. It doesn't matter how mad your characters get about the former, they just aren't as bad as the latter. Not even in the same ballpark. But the entire emotional arc of the book and its thesis relies on you agreeing that these things are morally equally bad.)
* = The Mote in God's Eye has some similar problems re: the "Oriental Horde" and clearly intentional parallels with the Moties. Luckily the story is so wild and imaginative that largely fades into the background (except when the protagonist is like "Yo genocide is cool y'all"), but does exist as very uncomfortable context.
