Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

[Lethologica]

The entire answer isn't as simple as a dichotomy in the demographics. Part of the answer is that Bay is loud and hamfisted, yes. But we also are more likely to reject Bay out of hand just because we would never submit Transformers as high art. Things for kids can be (and more times than not are) incredibly beautiful and well crafted. But we do have a stigma in film criticism that says that there is art and then there is trash. Stuff for kids are mostly thrown in the trash without a thought. Look how well Kubo and the Two Strings is performing. Look how often someone will vote whatever's Disney for Animated Film of the Year. Yes, Michael Bay is seen as trash and Transformers and Pearl Harbor belong in the trash, but a part of why we'd kick him back into the trash before looking at his next movie is because he's associated himself with kids media. Nobody in the film industry watched Avatar and said "Man, I thought that'd be about airbenders and I was disappointed." They called it genius. Nobody watched The Last Airbender and said "The kids cartoon was better." No, they said, "This is why cartoons don't get adapted into movies." It goes further than the unfair dichotomy and stale biases, but I'm just going to suggest that somewhere when Michael Bay moved from Armageddon to TMNT, a film critic poured himself a brandy and said, "Rhododendron."

Bay wasn't "pretty much the same" as Kubrick when they were both making films for adult audiences, and he isn't "pretty much the same" aside from his target audience now. Your decision to seize on the stigma of films for younger audiences as a primary or even relevant consideration doesn't reflect a serious consideration of their actual similarities and differences.