I don't go for the Silver-Age silliness. I find it really boring to read. It's just "what cooky, crazy thing can we come up with this month?" as opposed to telling a coherent story. I find that most of the love of those kinds of stories is based on pure nostalgia, usually for secondary media, like The Super-Friends or Batman!.
When Alex Ross puts Lex Luthor in his old purple-and-green togs and sticks him in The Legion of Doom's headquarters, you know that it's just a nod to Super Friends. That happens in the limited series Justice, as well as the last season of Justice League. Now, I'm all about the intertext and the metatext, but I find that a lot of that Silver-Age love, and Ross is an easy target here, has no depth. There is no point other than, "Boy, Super Friends... that was cool, eh?"
The opposite of that is Grant Morrison, whose inter/metatextual gestures tend to say something about those old stories, to point out their flaws or show how they functioned, or reveal something about the mind-set of the readers, way back when. Flex Mentallo is all about the confusion of the fan. All-Star Superman is about turning Silver-Age silliness into mythology, granting it the depth that it didn't originally have (something that Neil Gaiman is very good at, as well).
Mark Waid sits somewhere in the middle of those two. I don't find that his work has a whole lot of redeeming social value, with a couple of exceptions, but he's one of the most reliable writers in comics. His plot, dialogue, and character work is rock solid, and always entertaining. Empire isn't actually a commentary on the ideology of the supervillain, but it is a hell of a page-turner.
(If anyone's interested, I'm kinda sorta talking about Frederic Jameson's concepts of parody [as subversive mimicry] versus pastiche [ideologically conservative mimicry]. I hate myself for quoting Jameson, but here we are.)