I’m with you through most of this, but this absolutely is important to the studio, they want a four quadrant blockbuster.
The four quadrants don’t include “hardcore online fandom” though. The four quadrants are men, women, young, and old. Again, do small slivers of each quadrant coincide with self-described members of fandom? Absolutely. But the utility of fandom to a studio isn’t ticket sales. It’s free marketing. And even in that instance, free marketing is just cherries on top of an expensive pie they’ve baked to do most of the real work.
I get your point about feeling dismissive, and wanting to combat that dismissiveness - but that’s partially why I responded in the first place, because the initial response I was countering was legitimately dismissive based on basically nothing but a small, skewed, extremely online perspective that sought to reframe reality itself in order to make an argument seem more sound. And that’s also why I made sure to point out I’m not suggesting people’s personal opinions about the movies are invalidated by general audience reception, nor should they be. The Force Awakens made 930mil domestic and made more than a few top 10 of the year lists - and I feel like it’s still borderline incoherent in the editing at points and comes very close to fumbling the third act completely, for example. The argument I’m making here isn’t that “the movie was successful and has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of X, therefore you can’t ever complain about the movie.” That’s not my stance. My stance is “You can’t extrapolate from your own personal opinons, attribute them to millions and millions of other people on a whim, and then act as if that extrapolation is now observable, inarguable reality,” especially when what you’re claiming as reality is that a generally accepted, liked, and inarguably successful movie was merely “tolerated” all the way to the bank.