I think Bob just hates this film because he wants to. I'd like to see a smart person challenging him on this, because he is not giving any reasonable arguments.
Oh too much explanation(where? point to me the exact moment that happens.)
The power of love got through time and space.(no, it's the motivating factor. Gravity got through it actually).
Matt Damon is the bad guy.(no, he is a brilliant scientist who lost all hope and does not want to let Cooper go back and thus destrot humanity's last hope of survival, Michael Caine's Plan B).
For me, Bob just has no reason to hate it, it's just that he wants to, probably related to that offhand comment about Marvel films that Nolan denied ever having made. And related to The Dark Knight Rises which made a mess out of Bane's voice, true, but was just as dumb as The Dark Knight. To me, this just seems like a man who has become downright sycophantic towards one specific niche of film(MCU) and is willing to hate everything else.
And Lincoln to me just seems to push the tl;dr idea: you can have more than one idea in a film, you know? Case in point, Inception: reality, dreams, loss. NO! Don't have it be both emotional and smart, just choose one and run with it. What the hell dude?
Aaaanyway, if you state that, I think your validity as a critic is being seriously undermined as it's basically you saing: I can't follow more than one thing, so I don't like the movie. You must have hated Apocalypto then. And The Good, the bad and the ugly. And Blade Runner. Because all these films are throwing big ideas at you, while also having human emotion and drama built into them. You are basically demeaning every great piece of art every created, from Moby Dick to For Whom The bell tolls to Doctor Zhivago to Lawrence of Arabia to the Bridge on the River Kwai, etc. because it has more than one thing going on. Top notch.
And that Speilberg stuff is just a lie. Spielberg never touched the project and the Nolans redid everything basically except the core ideas, which were there before Spielberg. You 2 are just building this argument like Michael Palin building his castle in a swamp. And did you not see the first half of the film which is basically a family drama during the Dustbowl? Did you expect all that build up to be forgotten? Of course it was about family and a loving father and a guilt-ridden daughter. And about space, exploration, humanity's survival.