Spectre reads better as Bond's dream
Everything is personal now
I like how Craig's era Bond attempts to rebuild James Bond as a person rather than a vessel, but Spectre seems to have gone too far. Every hero needs a good villain, and Bond is no exception. In the previous trilogy, villains were desperate and evil for their own reasons, but Spectre introduced someone who was simply obsessed with Bond. The movie bullet-pointed an all-powerful villain who controls resources, politics, intelligence, but without demonstrating it, just like they did in Quantum of Solace casually dropping what Quantum is capable of but never demonstrated any of it to the audience. Spectre literally had what amounted to an earnings call, and then Oberhauser started talking. No, not about guidance for the next quarter, but his obsession about James.
Oberhauser, the matchmaker
Even the obsession that should shape the whole personality of the villain of villains seems inconsistent if you think about it. Oberhauser claimed to have orchestrated every misery in Bond's life, but also under Oberhauser's supposed watch, Bond had a rather successful career and became the most successful agent in MI6 history. Why would Oberhauser allow that? Also, rather than growing his underground network or seizing the world under his control, Oberhauser seemed to spend most of his time in the movie playing Cupid for Madeleine and Bond.
When he wanted Bond dead, he first led Bond to White who was dying himself, so Bond could find White's daughter Madeleine, "the only person who can understand him" in Oberhauser's own words. He then kidnapped Madeleine only so James could save her and travel with her. Even with all the surveillance, Oberhauser was still kind enough to turn a blind eye and let them spend a peaceful day together in L'Americain. He did not even bother to send someone to see what Bond and Madeleine were up to. Then, he sent Hinx to kill Bond, only to make Hinx the troll in Hogwarts whom Madeleine and Bond defeated together and helped them realize that they were physically attracted to each other. Even the torture in Oberhauser's headquarter threatened not with death or physical pain but that Bond would not be able to recognize Madeleine, and then Oberhauser remained gentlemanly enough for her to run to Bond, for Bond to assure her that he would remember her, for her to say I love you, and for Bond to finally set up a bomb at Oberhauser. It was hard to see how serious Oberhauser was about killing Bond, but he was indeed very keen to have Bond and Madeleine together in a Barney Stinson fashion, and for that, Oberhauser was willing to mobilize the most evil group of people in the world, per the earnings call.
Everyone is sleepwalking
In Spectre, everyone acts to contradict their stated interest: C wanted to dissolve the 00 section and centralize global surveillance and had literally won, but he decided to hunt Mallory and Bond, and when Mallory and Q showed up, he monologued about seizing power from the government to "do what should have been done" instead of just having security escort the supposedly irrelevant Mallory out. Then, C further decided to throw his triumph away and just shoot Mallory, a man he had stripped of all power that morning, only to find there was no bullet and he decided to fist-fight Mallory anyway.
And the delirium spread beyond the bad guys: Mallory talked so much about the license to kill also being the license not to kill, all while letting Bond run around doing whatever it takes to take down a target Bond deemed to be valuable. Q had mortgage and two cats, but not only failed to watch Bond but soon became actively complicit by providing all kinds of resources. Madeleine had every reason to hate Bond. Initially, Bond was the prime suspect of murdering her father, and then Bond was a living reminder of her father's world, a world she wanted nothing to do with, but all that anger did not stop her from dressing nicely to have a romantic dinner with Bond on the train with her flirty order of a dirty martini.
What if Bond dreamed it?
After infusing realism and focusing on Bond's vulnerability and humanity for a trilogy, what is it with the sheer amount of incoherence? At some point, the most coherent reading becomes that none of it was real.
At the end of Skyfall, Bond was physically and mentally unfit for service and had drug and alcohol problems. He lost M while barely defeating Silva, and he was already ruminating on M and his own obsolescence then.
Bond needed a purpose that he could process, so he dreamed that M gave him a crystal-clear instruction.
You never remember how a dream begins, so Bond started in the middle of the parade of Day of the Dead. He knew who to target without MI6 intelligence, and Sciarra conveniently mentioned the Pale King for no apparent reason.
Dreams feel normal even when they are strange, so in broad daylight Bond hijacked Sciarra's escape helicopter, throwing two people onto a plaza and fled, but news only talked about a building collapsed in Mexico City.
Oberhauser manifested Bond's need of a reason to kill beyond him killing the bad guys, so a villain who secretly orchestrated everything and personally hated Bond made it easy, and of course he was Bond's foster brother.
With all the past chasing him, Bond had to face it, so the old MI6 building scene was surreal, with important characters blatantly pasted there as if Bond was walking within his hippocampus, and of course once he walked one last time past it, it must be demolished.
Without M fending away all the obsolescence accusations, Bond had to face those accusations directly and they manifested as C. Bond might even partially agree with them, so C was all powerful, but he also thought the push against MI6 was evil and would eventually be overcome, so C became vaguely evil and then conveniently killed off just like Drake Ramoray falling into an elevator shaft.
Q and Moneypenny were overly resourceful even when it obviously broke all the security clearance and oversight structure the trilogy introduced previously because they were just convenient acquaintances. They appeared in your dream doing something that was narratively coherent, and you woke up and wondered "why do I dream about them doing something they would never do?"
Bond likely wanted to dream about Vesper, but he knew all too well and had spent the whole Quantum of Solace saying goodbye, so her reincarnation would kick him out of the dream, so he channeled a vague echo of Vesper. Madeleine is someone who armored herself, just like Vesper did, whom Bond tried to trust, whom Bond got acquainted with on a train, whom Bond flirted with using cocktails as a language, and finally whom Bond wanted to run away with.
In Bond's dream, Madeleine cannot have a clear character: Her secrets and her armor would be too painful to dream about. She cannot have agency because she must be rescuable. Bond couldn't save Vesper, so he dreams a woman he can. Bond did not face their enemy with Vesper because she died trying to protect him, so this time, Madeleine must be there when Bond faces the villain. Not to act, but to witness Bond being the protector he failed to be, so he can finally forgive himself.
Being normal
Bond was a spectacle. In the past, he never missed, he raced and walked out unharmed from a resultant car wreck, and he adjusted his cufflinks and tie when walking away from an exploding building. Craig's era writing raised the question "what if Bond is just a normal human?", and when we finally got to Spectre, the answer appeared obvious: There is a reason why 00 section agents have a short tenure.
If Bond cared and got hurt like normal people, and trusted and got betrayed like everyone else, he inevitably reached a point where he could no longer sustain being Bond. After Skyfall, Bond was so deeply scarred, with no one left close to him. For someone too broken to go on but too stubborn to stop, the only reasonable thing left is to dream, and this applies to both sides of the fourth wall.