My theory isn't a loss of control ... it's that there is TOO MUCH control. They're so slavishly committed to connections and continuity that it constrains everything they touch because it now all has to serve a master plan. Movies are overstuffed because you need 2-3 unnecessary characters in one story to seed they next. They blurred personalities between characters too ... now every single character is tossing quips off all the time.
Folks seem to forget that the MCU's origins were relatively loosey goosey. Thanos was dropped in originally as a lark, basically, not because they were building to him from day 1. Some of those early movies are a bit rough too, but they were smart enough to pick and choose what was working and THEN mold something stronger from it.
By phase 4 they're aggressively trying to engineer everything. No freedom. No room for discovery. Too much reading their own press clippings and thinking they constructed everything from whole cloth, when they really had a lot of luck too. Classic hubris.
I want them to loosen up. Let creators create and see what happens.
Bolded is definitely important in a few ways.
I think people absolutely have forgotten that the early MCU stuff was fairly mediocre as well quite frankly. Like the first couple of Thors, the first Captain America, a couple of the Iron Mans. None of those were great movies, fairly average I would say(And I would argue about on par with a lot of what we have gotten recently in the MCU but people are just way more critical of "average" from the MCU these days because of some of the great things they have done).
But it was the little teasers of continuity that helped build the world and then ultimately the first Avengers movie was an absolute banger that fully set things in motion going forward.
I think I can see the argument of there being too much emphasis of connectivity right now in some ways. Perhaps they need to go back to doing more localized stories with small teasers of the bigger world.
That said, I think what's missing right now in the MCU is that Avengers 1 type of movie. It doesn't even necessarily need to be Kang as the big bad or related to that next major villain. But something that basically shows you all of the nee characters we have together and how the dynamic between them is expected to be moving forward.
Then you can have them go off and deal with their own "adventures" in separate movies that don't tie into the big story as much, and continue dropping small connectivity teasers throughout.
And at the same time, maybe the problem at this point is that things have just bloated out of control. In that first Avengers movie you had Cap, Iron Man, Thor as the three main leads(Who had their own movies and not counting the Incredible Hulk her), with Hulk, Hawkeye, and Black Widow as the complimentary pieces and Nick Fury bringing them all together. As far as I can remember that was it at that point I think.
Now if you were to try and do a new Avengers film that tied in characters that have had movies/series' around them, you're looking at along with Thor, Hulk, and maybe Hawkeye who are still around, just characters on Earth you've also got: Doctor Strange, Wong, Ant-Man, The Wasp, Spider-Man, Shang Chi, Captain Marvel, Black Panther, Bucky, Falcon/New Captain America, all of the Eternals still, Kate Bishop, Mrs Marvel, She-Hulk, Moon Knight.... And then characters like Valkyrie and whoever else is in "New Asgard" at this point...
It's just a gigantic list of superheros with a lot of them not being particularly big names either.
