Previews often make bad movies look good, but it's rare for them to make good movies look bad. I will not be seeing WOTW, everything YOU'VE said about it afirms the opinion I got during the previews I would hate every minute of it.
Sugarland Express - one of his early movies that's actually very good, back when he used his talent. Important to note as much as I despise the modern SS Jaws is one of my all time favorite movies, problem is he just doesn't put the level of work into movies anymore
Empire of the Sun - this was actually the movie that first made me theorize that SS was feeling guilt over all the mass market tripe he was producing so he needed to make something "important"
ET - who expected it to be a small personal movie?! That thing got hyped up the wazzoo, I rememer seeing a full page print add for it in the paper 3 months before it came out. And really ET sucked, it was stupid and insulted the audience with its pedestrian heart string tugging.
Other movies that were "clogging" the theaters during SS's rise: Godfather, American Graffitti, Patton, A Bridge Too Far. Sure you can pick and chose bad movies during that time period, you can pick and cose bad movies during any time period. But when you open your eyes you see there was plenty of good stuff going on that wasn't SS.
The ending of AI is much happier than it would have been if SS ended the movie when he should have. Closing credits should have run with bot-boy chanting in his ship staring at the statue, but that was too much of a downer for Spielberg, he needed the kid to be real at least for a little while, and resurrecting the Close Encounter aliens was just silly.