What a complicated post and even after 2 reads I still am not sure to really get your point. But I think I do and I do not agree.

Back in the 80's Jon was a master at Bubblegum stories about being cowboys, about highschool romance and he was a master at writing sloganesque songs, basically stuff that would be great on t-shirts. Nothing wrong with that! It's like action hero movies or those romantic comedies and chickflicks. Those are extremely popular. It's for the masses and BJ were extremely good at it. So, it fitted perfect and they gave us the blockbusters.

In the 90'ies, they even got better by adding more layers to the lyrics at times and writing Dry County, These Days, I believe, Hey God, ... And on love songs, Jon remained on top of his game. ( Even if he was already selling us the idea that Bed of Roses and Always were not lovesongs )

Post 2000 things did not improve any further. Basically there was an overload of moon, june, spoon ( under the form of live your life, fight, stand up, don't back down, stand your ground, don't follow, ... ) but Jon would comment on those songs as songs that tackled various serious topics. Except for the fact that if Jon had not told you so, every song could just be about anything. And that's where Jon and Richie would always tell you that they were such great songwriters because they were able to take a specific story, and tell it in such a way that anyone could relate to it.

That was of course one way to look at it, but another way to look at it was the fact that their lyrics were pretty lazy, uber generic and never got above the level of bubblegum and t-shirt slogans.

In term of food - Bon Jovi were and remained Mc Donalds. Nothing wrong with that. Mc Donalds is probably the best fastfood chain in the world. Nothing wrong with fast-food. It's delicious at times and no-one can resist it.
It becomes another story when a fast food chain will try to sell you its fastfood as something different than what it is.

Fast forward to 2020 : Finally songs as lower the flag, Do what you can, American Reckoning and Unbroken are songs that are right on topic, no doubt about what they are and because of the topic, a lot of people will be able to relate. Sure, you can not interprete them freely anymore, but they are stories well written. Finally he's getting there. Weather everyone likes this or not is another story, but Jon finally did it.