you gotta think the medium they were in though. For boring ass 90s grunge/alt rock (neither necessarily boring but few are good at it) they weren't godawful because its a pretty monotone and boring medium in the first place. Elliott was just so damn talented he could turn anything into gold.
I listen to a lot of that kind of music though, man. While I'll agree that there were a lot of bands just trying to sound like Nirvana and it got dull there were a lot of cool alt rock bands that did their own thing during the time. I think even for the genre the Neil Gust stuff was pretty unremarkable.
EDIT: I read your post kind of fast and now realizethat some of what I said was kind of redundant with what you said. Sorry about that.