Yeah, those guys saying "Why don't you do it better" are idiots, unless they give away the actual money to be able to do it better. I'm sure there are many guys around here who would have been able to write a much better script (either from scratch, or as a revision of the Orci draft), and many who would have been able to direct a far superior movie with that budget.
Insults aside..
I think my point here is that many fans here think they could write a script, or direct a movie, but the fact is that instead of doing something brilliant, they're simply here bitching about it. They didn't get the gig, nor do they really deserve it, and they want to use teh intrawebs as their bully pulpit to tell everyone else how it all should have been done. I don't think any one of these "armchair" hotshots would last a day on a film set, otherwise we would have heard about their exploits in Variety by now.
That's a lot of crap, and you're much more the fool than I ever thought if you don't realize it deep down. Plenty of people don't 'make it' or 'catch on' regardless of talent. It could be money, it could be leaving town or the industry to take care of a sick relative (Robin Curtis springs to mind) ... hell, I remember John Carpenter mentioning often in articles that the best filmmaker he ever knew couldn't ever break in. (and no, numbthoughts, that isn't namedropping as you put it, that is INFORMATION ... you know, 'we want information.')
But the difference is that I did try for more than 15 years, while holding down fulltime work and taking care of other people. And I still work on the non-spendy (i.e. spec writing) end when time allows. So I don't have anything to prove to myself in this regard, and in terms of proving anything to you ... get real, bub. You want something of mine other than what you see here, you pay for it. And if you don't like what you see here, there's some kind of ignore function, isn't there?