I love the story and art direction
Yes, it's very clever to have the brilliant minds at NASA be smart enough to know they have to reach out to the right people for the job: the oil rig operator and deep sea driller and his crew. So much more interesting than just having astronauts do the job!
Yes. I recently watched Deep Impact which came out the same summer and its production value is not even close to that of Armageddon
Audiences thought so, too. Armageddon came out around three months after Deep Impact and did better than Deep Impact at the box office, and wound up being the top grossing movie of 1998. It even did better than Saving Private Ryan, the Steven Spielberg film starring Tom Hanks and Matt Damon.
It has even been included in the Criterion Collection.
Right, it's #40 in the Criterion Collection. Peter Becker from Criterion defends the movie as being great enough to belong in their collection of quality films.
I don't know why people think it is so hollywood. It is a artistic film 
Yes, the critics may have preferred Deep Impact, but audiences went with Armageddon. And film scholar Jeanine Basinger from Wesleyan University praises the film as a work of art by a cutting-edge artist, a master of movement, light, color and shape. It is definitely artistic!