"A lot of DC characters are archetypes"
That's it in a nutshell. Not just archetypes that later characters were based on, but archetypes in the Jungian sense, a callback to mythologies instead of storytelling.
To me that's always been the critical difference between DC and Marvel. Marvel tells stories of people who stumble into having unusual powers through very human circumstances. DC tells myths.
Every time Marvel tries to go the mythic route (Earth X, Marvels, etc), they can't keep up the intensity, and every time DC tries to go human and relatable, they blow it.
They have their own styles and the characters reflect that. For my money, one of the better stretches in comicdom was Morrison's JLA run, where he purposefully built a pantheon and told stories that wouldn't have been out of place in Campbell's research. Relatable, they were not, but they were mythic in scale and scope.
Marvel writes humans, DC writes demi-gods.
And those are *DAMNED* hard to translate to the big screen for one-shots, but as you said, they haven't earned the audience good will to build a world and draw the viewer in. Quite the opposite.
Ironically, the Arrowverse did a better job of that...
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