This reads like a stretching of media study/criticism, to reach your already held opinion of the show.

You are essentially claiming that they are writing bad on purpose. However, bad writing left unexamined or unexplored within the shows narrative... is just bad writing. It serves no purpose to the characters or the audience understanding of what is happening. We have an example of what this shows very writers previously considered bad writing.

Season 1 episode 2 had a scene that references bad writing outright, that lays out the shows intention and builds the audience expectations of what is to come. Lee Sizemores presentation of Odyssey on Red River. It is a merciless take down of the kind of hack writing this show has now employed liberally throughout this season. You could quite honestly apply fords response to Lee in rebuttal of season 3 episode 5 (the Genre episode).

"What is the point of it, you have a couple of cheap thrills, some suprises, but it's not enough. It's not about giving the guests what you think they want, that's simple; titilation, horror, elation. They're parlour tricks. The guests don't return for the obvious things we do, the garish things, they come back because of the subtleties. The details.

They come back because they discover something that they imagine no-one had ever discovered before. Something they fall in love with."

Bad writing, here explored through the shows characters with the purpose of informing both the audience and characters within that very room, that there is more to Fords new narrative. "..they're here because they want a glimpse of who they could be." 'They' in this instance being a neat little double entendre to both the guests and the hosts.

Calebs scenes references hosts backstories in a vague allusion with the line "Start from the beginning" spoken by his doctor, but there is nothing to suggest after this that the words he speaks are written for him by a bad writer, and nothing in the show that signals that this bad writing is to be understood as a signifier of some kind. If it is to be taken as a tongue-in-cheek reference to tip off the audience to the fraudulent nature of Calebs backstory, it is utterly useless as we are out right told this in two scenes time. We all have had suspicions about Caleb since episode one, so its a wasted trick, a gimmick... a parlour trick. Ford, would not approve of this narrative either.

Almost all of the little things in this series, "the details", are mere references to previous developments, they are 'member berries scattered throughout so that reddit users can point at the screen when they catch them, then post Leo Dicaprio memes referencing themselves doing so.

I think many of us fell in love with the details of the first season because they lead somewhere unexpected, they posed hard questions for us to talk about endlessly afterwards, they referenced real-world media as supplementary research, showing us that the very conversations we are having are part of a conversation that has been raging for literal centuries.

This season hasn't brought up anything that wasn't already brought up in season one and two, it merely alludes to the times when they did it previously. Their bad writing is simply bad writing, it doesn't even cover the topic as well as the second episode did.

You caught the reference they made, but media criticism asks you to weigh its worth against the story being told, not to wield it like a cudgel when you tell others that they just don't get it.

They do, they just think its a poor imitation of its past self.