A discipline either establishes common criteria to distinguish good stuff from bad stuff or it doesn't. And these should not be arbitrary otherwise the judgment remains subjective and therefore worthless.
Since you admit that "there's alot of hacks", it seems literary criticism has no criteria or they are mostly subjective. Otherwise, you wouldn't have such a lot of hacks, but just a few.
It obviously produces hardly anything worth knowing, no?
This is within the field. From the outside, this is even more dense and impenetrable, and probably looks almost masturbatory. Despite this, there is a fairly strong correlation of "good style" and "good software" so there is at least some objective measure there.
Of course, since there are hacks in the software world (arguably the majority of them, since very few HNers run in the circles of bank software engineer or .Net programmer, and those people are the majority of programmers), the discussions on what makes good software probably don't result in anything worth knowing, or barely anyway.
I am not commenting on your overall conclusion, I don't know if lit. crit. is a worthy pursuit, but your argument is definitely lacking a sound basis.
\ I worked with a guy who would copy and paste program, with many many repetitions of blocks. After of getting a barely working result, would seemingly decide "oh functions are important in programming" and randomly break the code into a few functions, which each took 10+ arguments to carry state over from chunk to chunk. Since these were essentially just chaining the calls, none of the functions would be called elsewhere, no repetition was avoided, and extra cognitive load was added to reading the results. When this was done, the original author could not understand how it was different, let alone better.
1) Establish the "text" in question as well as the "context" of the text (certain themes, symbolism, diction, universality, etc.)
2) apply culturual congruity (whether you are applying the criticism to the time when the text was written or to modern times),
3) Establish your point of argument and/or analysis.
4) Apply argument to the text
5) Connect the evidence of this argument.
6) Conclusion
The fact that I use Bloom as a shining example of "good" criticism should steer you in the direction that there is quality there. His just one example of good work.
Is there an API to access Plato's Republic's quality hooks? No, but there are best practices. Just because you refuse to see them as common criteria doesn't diminish the task at hand. If you refuse to accept it as legitimate, you might as well refuse to accept there are such things as great literature and creation beyond the programmatic kind.
And when most people talk about great literature, they aren't talking about either thing. Most people mean something like Adler's Great Books criteria when they talk about great literature: