Don't blame director for your inability to understand his works.
I'm adding "Avalon" it might be cheesy at times but I still love it.
It's not that I don't understand what Oshii was doing, A child could understand his hackneyed pseudo-philosophy.
No the Problem with Oshii, is that he is making animated films, with one of the best animation studios in the world... and 90% of his movies are people standing around, droning on and on in monotone voices, while he shows off his background scenery. He is Japan's Tim Burton... he takes someone else's property, and gives it his own twist. Where Burton makes everything all gothy and angsty, Oshii makes it irredeemably boring.
Oshii took Patlabor, a serious firmly rooted in the action.comedy genre... and turned it into... hell I still have no idea what that movie was supposed to be about, because I can't stay awake to finish it.
And Avalon, was the Japanese equivalent of Suckerpunch.... pretty eye candy, but ultimately a jumbled mess with no real direction. Worse yet,. it suffered the same fatal flaw as the Matrix.... in that the whole movie is watching someone else play a video game...