Any number QBs is fine with me.  Live draft is really preferred.  But if people can't handle it, then auto is okay.

Points of agreement:

1. Blue Velvet is probably his best film. I say probably because I think Mulholland Drive might be a fuller realization of what he was trying to accomplish with BV. I think he might actually have pulled it off.
2. Twin Peaks ended badly. Very badly.
3. He's made some inscrutable, boring, and, yes, bad films.

Your original post was that he "tries too hard to be outside." The complaints you've listed suggest that you believe he has failed in his attempt to do whatever it is he's trying to do. From what I've read from him and know of him, he seems less concerned with the film industry as a whole (not just Hollywood, I mean the industry) than any other director I've ever encountered.

It goes beyond mere posturing that he "doesn't read the critics" or that "he wants to create a new direction in film"; this would mean that he is supremely conscious of trends and current ideas in the film world and is reacting to them, i.e. setting his films up in opposition to them and "trying to be outside."

That's the short answer. I don't see his film as "reactive," and therefore don't think it's fair to say he's trying to be weird for weirdness sake.

Why I like Lynch:

In Lynch's case, I think he's achieved the right to call himself an "auteur." That word gets thrown around for people like Spielberg, Scott, etc., but I think Lynch has earned it. Why? Because again and again his films go after the same patch of psychological/spiritual turf. He has an artistic vision of how the world is (not necessarily a personal vision) and he tries to bring that across in his films.

Well, so does every director, right, big deal?

The difference with Lynch is that he tries to achieve this vision almost entirely with tone. The creation of a complex and nuanced tone is one of the few areas in which novels still have a decided edge on films because film as a visual medium works better with exposition than suggestion. Film can certainly suggest and suggest well, but novels can still do this more ably. I think Lynch is a great Victorian novelist working as a commercial filmmaker. I don't want to compare him to Joyce because that's unfair, but he is challenging his medium in much the same way that Joyce did. Is he successful? Certainly not to the same degree; perhaps not al all. His flims aren't reacting to the norms of the genre; they're trying to expand the possibilities of the genre to comply with a particular artistic notion. That's usually a recipe for bad art, and almost always a recipe for unpopular art, but there it is.

The other thing I like about Lynch beside his experiment with tone in film, is that he is essentially a moralist. I've heard it said by friends that Lynch's films betray some sort of nihilism or chaotic world view. I couldn't disagree more. He is a moralist of the old, Judeo-Christian order: he believes in original sin. And as a moralist he is rather akin to Cormac McCarthy--one of your favorites. But whereas McCarthy mostly uses violence to access the "fallen" state of human nature, Lynch uses fear. So many of the characters he approaches are fairly standard: physically abused women, sexually abused people, emotionally repressed adults, drug-ravaged teenagers, etc. The awfulness of the character's situation is easy to read, but Lynch taps into the fear implicit in all of them and manages--through his manipulation of tone--to make it palpable to the audience. I have never felt as truly afraid for a character in a film as I was for Isabella Rossilini's character in Blue Velvet or for any number of character's in Mulholland Drive. Dennis Hopper's character in Blue Velvet or the man behind the dumpsters in Mulholland Drive are more frightening to me than any ghost, monter, or psychopath. On the flipside of the coin, I have never felt as truly engaged with a moment of love/lust as the lesbian sex scene in Mulholland Drive. Not in any prurient, pornographic way, but I thought he captured a moment of passion in a way so particular and yet so accessible, that it's ruined every other sex scene (or love scene) I've seen since. He captures something true there that I'm not sure I've seen anyone else capture.

I'm not a film student, so I feel out of my depth discussing Lynch. I'm aware of a few things he does technically that are neat, but I couldn't discuss them intelligently. I also don't claim to understand always what's going on in his films, but by learning to appreciate these two things--his experiments with tone and his world view--I've found I can appreciate almost all of his work and enjoy a good bit of it.