I remember in a literature survey course in college (they made engineers take humanities in the vain hopes of rounding them out--thank god I could just read for some of them), when, during a test, I stumbled on the idea of how universal and metaphorical and thematic the whole deal with Odysseus' mythic quest was. You know, captain of the soul and all that crap, and it seemed pretty powerful at the moment, but then there was a good chance I was hung over. Regardless, both teh Heroic Quest (which got harped on well enough in the various benighted times of the places where people believed in nasty little fairies as much as big daddy gods), and The Savior (a specialized version that I'm tempted to pin this on monotheism, but may be wrong) go on pretty well with the modern embrace of the individual.
I think genre fantasy has butchered these themes throroughly enough to deserve its place in the ghetto (pity the authors who do it well, or who are clever enough to do other things with those motifs). Pullman (and the Wachowski brothers) are drawing on that tradition more than anything. It finds most of its appeal in young people, who are in the thick of finding their inner person besieged at a point in their life where every minor incursion to their self seems like the foulest affront, every attraction is is imbued with 20 extra tons of romance, and every change in teh weather looks like it'll affect every aspect of your life forever. Every 17-year-old boy is carrying a cross around, in other words.
I'm not against the form in and of itself--there's lots of universality in literature if you look for it, and archetypes can even be used well--but mostly I'm with you. But for every gigantic Deus ex Ego story, there's something being overlooked that's small in scope and self-contained, some clever use of language or deft exploration of interesting concepts, some brilliant setting (Pullman did get me here) some likable characters, some drama that accepts a scope outside the blown-up emotions of distressed teenagers.
I'd call yours a needed rant.