Yep, it's about telling a story in the end and not the special effects. Hollywood and movie studios can't seem to get their mind wrapped around that though. I have also noticed that the longer that films tend to spend in a development cycle the more likely they are to not be that good. I wonder if too much overthinking the storyline goes on.
I see the extremes. These movies are either badly in need of at least 2-3 (more) rounds of edits (on the script side, before being filmed), or they are so obviously the result of a thousand edits by producer-writers-who-aren't-actually-good-writers that, like you say, they are so overly thought out as to be drained of any spark.
Not to get into a bunch of little threadjacks, but what I see as evidence of those:
The Last Jedi was an amazing first draft from a great writer. It badly needed some SW people editing and refining those ideas and it would've been great. Unfortunately, it was great big ideas destroyed by poor continuity, and was clearly the effort of one man who is always full of great ideas, but needed and didn't receive some much needed pushback in order to fit these ideas into the source material. On the flip side, all of the non-trilogy movies were obviously hampered by firing directors somewhere near the halfway point. They felt like they were made by committee in parts, and those parts are always the weakest bits. Just one example: Rogue One is great, but the first third of that movie was obviously the victim of some harebrained decisions. Jyn is billed as a "rebel's rebel" and yet spends the first third of the movie literally just following along with anything anyone tells her, no matter how little she knows them or has reason to trust them. Some of the most beautiful shots from the third act that we saw in the trailers were nowhere to be found in the movie, and they were very obviously missing to a huge amount of the audience, not just some bit of movie trivia that comes out 6 years later in a YT video of "fun things we saw in the trailer but didn't make it to the screen that everyone missed!"
I just don't understand why Hollywood takes the wrong lessons from all of this stuff, all of the time. MOTU was at its best when it stopped winking at the camera and jabbing us in the ribs telling us they just told us a joke we should laugh at, and instead just got to the action. Some of those fight sequences were great, and some of the directing was even beautiful in points. But the tone was all over the place and clearly came from a lack of polish, either somewhere in the writing, or somewhere in the producers-meddling stage. It had all the elements of what made D&D:HAT a fun movie, but none of the personality and charm, despite a cast that was clearly game for it.
