Last I heard, bad writing was a property, not a conditional. If something is bad writing, it's bad writing. It doesn't magically become not bad writing if the reader happens to have the fortune of the necessary ignorance to not notice. That's like saying potato chips are health food because they don't make starving children obese.
And the basic, fundamental facts of major stories written mere months prior or consistent characterizations that have spanned decades and remained solid in every appearance of a character hardly qualify as "encyclopedia-like knowledge of stories written 20 years before you were born."