My basic opinion is that Spider-Man has been a mess for a while now, and the movies just seem to continue this trend. On some levels I confess to a certain degree of schadenfreude at seeing Bob's reaction to this after he's pretty much promoted some of the various changes made to characters I have been a fan of in the name of "political correctness" as being good things, while I've had very similar reactions to those Bob has to Spider-Man based around people messing around with an IP I'm invested in.
That said, Spider-Man can be tricky to write, which I think is a lot of the problem. People want to keep him as a teenager or student in a lot of the media despite him having become a bona-fide adult in the comics. What's more people tend to forget that neither the current version or the old "Toby McGuire" version had it quite right. Peter Parker is supposed to be a nerd, but at the same time he's not supposed to be *that* much of a Sad Sack, people tend to forget the point of characters like Felicia Hardy and that Peter probably could have stolen Flash's girlfriend in school if he really put his mind to it, and drama over Felicia liking him was part of what inspired Flash's antics. Not to mention Felicia dressing up as "The Black Cat" and the whole interplay between their costumed identities as well, which made Felicia/Peter pairings popular "what if" scenarios and so on. In short to do a perfect "Spider Man" they need to walk between the extremes we're seeing in the movies. The fact is Peter is both the science geek misfit, AND the "cool dude" who remains unfazed in incredible situations and drops a constant stream of wisecracks. The trick is to make it so Peter easily steps into the costumed role on a lot of levels (guilt aside) and it should be obvious enough that his identity being compromised because of it should always be kind of a threat.
The thing is though that for quite a while now we've seen Spider-Man dumped on because it seems few people know how to write the character or have any ideas on where to go with it. We've had garbage like "The Clone Saga" and "One More Day", not to mention that most of the stuff people keep coming up to do with the character seems to revolve around it being someone else as Spider-Man. Say the "Ultimate" reboot of Spider-Man as a black-Hispanic teenager named Milo Morales (not even Peter Parker anymore... yet still we're being told this was Spider-Man, surprisingly Bob didn't seem to be on the hate-wagon for that one), or the whole "Superior Spider Man" thing where they pretty much killed Peter and had him living on as a ghost inside Doc Ock's head, with one of his greatest foes becoming the new Spider Man.
The point I'm getting at here is that when the comics themselves miss a lot with the character (and investing in major events as they miss) and keep trying to reinvent the character in new and attention-getting ways for sales, it's not surprising that the latest movies are doing the same, and themselves have done a lot of reinvention.
To be honest I was never big on the whole "innate web shooters" aspect of the Toby Macguire movies and the way they had the little spikes coming out of his hands to crawl, and I think they made him too much of a dweeb. The new movies restored some of the original mythology but too the character too much to the extreme other end of his personality spectrum. The end result is that real fans can rest assured that we have not seen a "final word" on Spider Man movies and bringing it perfectly to the cinema. In a way it gives us something to look forward to. One "sad" thing about the current Marvel "Cinematic Universe" is that they did such a good job with so many of those characters I doubt anyone will ever be able to do better without inviting a negative comparison. On some levels when the rights revert back to Marvel it will probably be when those trains grind to a halt, and then after a break they can work on things like "Spider-Man", "The X-men", and "The Fantastic Four" with the potential of creating them to the same quality.
As far as the Spider-Man villains go, yeah... I have to agree they seemed fairly sad. They really needed to at least give Electro his trademark costume, and really the whole defining characteristic of "The Rhino" is how he's bonded to his suit, just making him a mook in battle armor doesn't capture the essence of the character. Especially seeing as half the point of "The Rhino" is that he'd probably be a world class strongman character (his upper limits of strength and durability are impressive even by Marvel standards if I remember) if he wasn't so stupid. He's a guy that Spider Man pretty much has to outsmart or outmaneuver, being tough enough where he generally just can't take him head on.
