Most silent movies are gone so there are less chances to catch a bad one. And there were some stinkers and clankers especially during the shorts era. The studio fires made sure of that unfortunately.

The other thing with silent film is that it required a peculiar grasp on film language that forces more creative approach because you only have visuals and editing to do the job and it is mighty hard to do the trick.

What’s funny is that american cinema wasn’t the brightest bulb in this department - if you compare even something like peak DeMille or Borzage from the 1920s and then switch to Europe - some Lang or Murnau or Renoir or Gance - DeMille’s cinematic language seems kindergarten level. I mean even the great Browning was rather limited in his cinematic vocabulary and kept everything very vaudvillain theatric - and on the other side - Fairbanks and Keaton relied more on stunt spectacle than film language. Chaplin is an outlier - he evolved very rapidly and his work reflects some of the cutting edge film theory of the era.

Stroheim is a weird case because he’s fairly limited as a director (his storytelling approach is comparably basic and follows the Griffith template) but he applied what he knew with such intensity and commitment that his limitations worked to his benefit. Kinda like a fighter who practiced that one punch one thousand times in a way. Greed is a good example of that - it’s a backwards movie if you compare it to someone like Dovzhenko or Eisenstein but it doesn’t really matter because Stroheim makes it work within his language.