I don't think any of this has to with the director - it's the audience.

Films today have to appeal to an audience that has a limited attention span - if you don't have a massive explosion every 30 seconds they lose interest. It needs a simple plot (or non at all in some cases) and characters with the depth of a puddle. After all, look the the success of reality TV.

Make a film with a really good plot, characters with depth and a storyline that requires the audience to pay attention and it'll be labelled as "highbrow" or "too intellectual".

While that's true of the majority of films these days it seems, I don't accept it completely (The Dark Knight, Public Enemies, Training Day), and there's varying levels of cheese and ham - as an example, I'd actually sooner watch GI Joe again than Transformers 2, because it has much less of what you describe above