When Iron Man came out in 2007, it was relatively unremarkable. Several other superhero one-offs were in already in play including X-Men, Spider-Man, and Batman. Iron Man was definitely better than the average, but didn't stand out too much, except for one thing. The post credit scene gave audiences a promise: we're going somewhere with this, The Avengers are coming. Every Phase I film contributed to that goal. Each one was an opening act and The Avengers was the main event. The same cannot be said for Age of Ultron which has more in common with Iron Man 2.
From Iron Man to Captain America: The First Avenger, several stories were opened up and left unresolved, because The Avengers was going to do it. By the end of that film, Hulk had learned to control his anger, Thor had captured Loki, Cap had learned he still had a place decades out of his time, SHIELD's plans for the tesseract were revealed, and Iron Man learned that he could be a truly selfless hero. All of these were stories opened up by the preceding films and reached their climax in The Avengers. It was the goal that the entire MCU was working toward and it didn't disappoint. Once it was done, the series moved on to its next goal, which, it turned out, was not the next Avengers movie.
Unlike its predecessor, Age of Ultron was not a finale for the stories opened up by the Phase II films. By its end, Cap is still searching for Bucky, Loki is still secretly king of Asgard, and of course the Infinity Stones are still floating around. Now some things were resolved. Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver were fleshed out after their intro in The Winter Soldier, and Stark seemed to have resolved his PTSD by accepting that the world would always be threatened, but the film was not designed to resolve everything. It was a stepping stone to something more.
Age of Ultron is more like a solo film, but for the entire team. Ultron was a far less compelling villain than Loki because we hadn't seen him before and wouldn't again. He was just there to facilitate the changes in the characters, as well as introduce new ones for what's coming. The next main event that the universe is preparing for is the Infinity War. Most of the new films will contribute to that goal, and possibly others, such as the Civil War.
The Avengers was an intense action rush that could afford to spend time on long fight sequences because it wasn't hard to wrap things up for the sub plots. Conversely, AOU has significantly more subplots because its job is to move things into place for future stories. It's easy to be disappointed in it because it wasn't as epic and had several subplots that just moved things around, but it is single cog in a great machine. That the Avengers will reunite as a team is a forgone conclusion, so Marvel took the opportunity to make the changes it needed for something later.
As evidenced by Agents of SHIELD and other works, Marvel writers like to play the long game. They're not afraid to give a weaker story in preparation for a greater one. The message of Age of Ultron isn't 'sorry this wasn't as good'. It's 'enjoy this for now, but the best is yet to come.'
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