Everybody gets an opinion, even if it's wrong.....
I find The Wall (taken in its entirety) to be tedious and shallow. With some good tunes created along side some pretty wretched ones. With all of them (again) brilliantly orchestrated by Michael Kamen. But overall, less there, there, than ever in their discography.
So all that proves is there's a multiplicity of opinion. I get the isolation that they all describe as a running theme in post-modern Society. (And never more virulent than in the Internet age.) But never was the narrative tighter than with DSOTM.
Everybody's opinion gets 'em to where they need to go. It's okay to disagree. But for me, Musically, they were cannibalizing themselves pretty severely by the time of the Wall and afterwards.
Some good things happened in the "theme and variations" sense, but nothing had the Musical Vitamins and Minerals of DSOTM, in my estimation. Record sales aren't a good rubric for quality (especially after the latter '70's) but
that didn't really deteriorate until Popular Music was Corporatized and execs (whom Frank Zappa described as punks who started out getting the mail and coffee) hung on until the old cigar chompers retired or died off. (Interestingly, Zappa preferred the Cigar chompers and so did I....) The Coffee and Mail fetchers started telling AUDIENCES their age what they should like/buy. ("After all, they had the same hair"-FZ...) This was brilliantly illustrated in "Tinseltown Rebellion". I always thought the band not mentioned by name in that tune could very well have fit several, ranging from PF to Chicago.
Chicago fits that timeline better because their Fourteenth record was a desperate attempt to "punkify" Jazz-Rock. (Which was a terrible mistake.) The "off they go to SIR, to learn some stupid riffs" lyric describes where they were at that time.
Even my most cherished Musical Artists have had "off" moments. It's not a crime, nor really much of a surprise. I was very surprised and relieved by "The Division Bell". That was a return to "greatness" from my perspective. But that's a conclusion that I can only justify for myself.
I thought all the indictments of Education (The Wall) was a severe conceptual misfire. But then, I didn't attend British private schools in the '60's. I did teach with somebody who was ran off from the American School in London, and a lower-life pseudo-intellectual I have yet to meet. He wasn't a product of British Education though. I think his Alma Mater was Cornell. He made for a strong defense for "The Wall". Everybody's experiences are different. Peace.