I don't see how it's either. "Milton" was not a movie. You could call it an adaptation. As for not very good, well, de gustibus.

The original "Wild Wild West" was a TV show; there was a 1980 TV movie, but the 1999 film is neither a remake nor a sequel to that 1980 movie. I'm using pretty expansive/liberal definitions of the terms here, I admit, but I think broadly my point stands just fine.

I agree that your overall point is broadly correct, but I think that a good principle in internet discussion is to be "liberal in the evidence you accept, and conservative in the evidence you 'send'".

The overall thrust of the "there's too many sequels and remakes" argument is that recent cinema shows a staleness/creative exhaustion in the industry, which is relying on brand recognition to cover for its failings. One creator expanding on their animated shorts to make a feature film out of them (Office Space) or a filmmaker making a (relatively creative, I think) adaptation of Shakespeare (10 Things I Hate About You), doesn't really demonstrate that, IMO. Many of the other examples you cite do. Certainly people have been complaining about sequelitis in movies for as long as I can remember (30+ years).

My own impression of a big trend in film over recent decades is the decline of comedies, especially in the family comedy/romantic comedy sub-genres. But I don't have hard data on that either.

While everything you say is valid, even subtracting those two examples, that's still a hefty list of films from 1999 that fall into sequel/remake territory, much like the modern day movies that the ancestral post is complaining about.