but... says who? They sound like half-baked ideas that arm-chair movie critics have internalized and regurgitate at the slightest opportunity.
I was so much more interested in watching Nolan introduce more elegant but mind-bending ideas about the mechanics of recursive dreaming and then manifesting them with spectacular action scenes, than I was interested in the missing 'character development' milieu like watching the protagonist play with his kids, have a normal domestic argument with his wife, become a workaholic etc. etc.
The characters explained their plans and problems because it made sense for them to do so (ie. it never felt contrived for the audience's sake), and the explanations in themselves were entertaining. Deeper thematic ideas were still tackled, like the central point of how the protagonist needed to untangle himself from his subconscious regrets/guilt before he was ready to have a real life with his children, just not in the usual sappy ways that we've seen thousands of times before. And I refuse to accept that the film was confusing -- yes there were a couple of details that we discussed on the way home from the cinema but satisfactory explanations were forthcoming. All films have details like that, with Inception they're more fun to figure out.