I could care less whether rock critics liked BOTT or whatever. What I love about it is two-fold. First, the stories of most the songs have a reality and a mundaneness that is moving to me, and lacking in a lot of his other works. All those songs in Desire about boxers and gangsters, yah yah yah. Turns me off. But "You're a Big Girl Now," "Tangled Up In Blue," "Next Time You See Her," etc. That's stuff I can hear again and again. Planet Waves has those sorts of tunes as well.
Secondly, BOTT has excellent musicians and arrangements and sound and flow. It really is genuinely pretty and well-executed and flowing. I just marvel at the atmosphere and mood and beauty. A sort of pinnacle of that sort of Dylan material for me. (Just as Planet Waves is a sort of a pinnacle of the rock sound, texture and execution that was started in the sixties).
There are other really good albums after these, but none of them really hit me in the same way. Don't seem as realized or "real." I have favorites (including Under the Red Sky and Real Live and Time Out of Mind) but BOTT means the most to me.