:’) I don’t think McCartney’s evil — even though he threatened to fire anyone working on one of his tours if they ate meat, that just makes him stupid and venal — but he’s not a great lyricist (to put it politely).
who do you consider to be a great lyricist
The man is constitutionally incapable of completing a song. If you listen to his stuff for long, you pick up a pattern, that his "songs" are mostly crazy-quilts of ideas, none of which are sufficient to make a song, but string a bunch of them together and it sort of lasts long enough to be called one.
The wonderful epic medley on the backside of Abbey Road was a precursor. "Band On the Run" is a good example of the quilt effect. The only reason the "McCartney" tunes of the Beatles' repertoire worked, was that John helped Paul write the middle-eight of most of them, and helped him close the ones that didn't fade out.
In fairness, Paul helped John as well, and in similar ways. Their differences made for a marvelous collaboration.
(BTW, for a good example of how to blend different themes into a coherent whole, consider Led Zeppelin's "Dazed and Confused".)
Mind you, I'm a true-blue Beatles fan from 1964 to the present, and I consider them to be the greatest rock/pop band in history by a considerable margin.