I think I figured it out
The reason Thor: Ragnarok is so popular is the same reason Spider-Man: Homecoming took off by turning Peter Parker into a Miles Morales-flavored, vine-quoting Generic Gen Z Teen Superhero. And that is that Marvel basically stopped telling a Thor story and just parroted fandom’s crazily misinformed headcanon back at them, at the expense of the story really having anything to do with Thor or the four movies he’d already been in.
Ragnarok’s characterization is literally straight out of a fanfic in the worst way. Loki is a crazed supervillain who has killed thousands? Forget all that, now he’s just a wacky prankster who wants to be hugged. Odin is a wise but foolhardy ruler who makes mistakes but means well? Now he’s a problematic ogre who once was a brutal dictator, giving Loki the precious moral high ground over him. And Thor is a goodhearted but clumsy and idiotic oaf who Loki rolls his eyes at.
Really, I wouldn’t be surprised if they got rid of Jane and Sif to make it easier for the yaoi fangirls to ship Thor and Loki together. Note that they make a huge deal out of the new female lead being a lesbian so she can’t possibly stand in the way of brother-fucking. I mean, movie Valkyrie literally doesn’t have anything in common with her comic book counterpart, but she definitely sleeps with women, we can’t compromise on that. (Identity politics is a helluva drug.)
A few days ago, we kinda discussed fans ‘running the asylum,’ and I feel this is a good counter to that ‘the fanboy is always wrong’ discourse. A fan can, obviously, add extremely good or bad stories to the source material. Where you really go wrong is when you pander to a misinformed segment of the fanbase at the experience of the canon’s integrity. You wouldn’t let, like, a big Empire fan write a Star Wars story where the Stormtroopers are big humanitarians and Darth Vader donates every spare dime to charity and the Rebels are a bunch of sexist, racist terrorists, and by the same token, it’d be a bad idea to have a Star Wars creative type, fan or no, try to appeal to the Imperial fans by writing that.
Like, it’s pretty obvious Toboggan Waverly isn’t a Thor fan, but he was probably at least savvy enough to Google Thor, see the most common misinterpretations of the mythos, and realize “hey, if I just pander shit to these guys and throw in a social justice message so half-assed that my wonderful new heroine is literally an unrepentant slave trader, I’ve got it made.”