There are better ways to do it though.

Dafoe's Goblin and Doc Ock had too many similarities in their development and how they relate to Peter that it felt lazy and forced to me. It was too deliberate, it lacked authenticity. Making each villain redeemable and just "good guys in bad situations", not entirely responsible for their all of their actions, wasn't something I wanted to see from established Spider-man villains. Raimi went out of his way to do this for each one with the exception of Venom, who would have been the best candidate for that treatment according to his comic book backstory.

It's entirely possible to have villains that have understandable motivations for their villainous behavior and still be flat out bad, without being one note characters lacking depth. Loki, Aldrich Killian, Ra's al Guhl for example.

Again, with the tentacles, the issue I have is that it gives him an out, he's not fully responsible for his evil. Similar idea with Norman Osborn and the gas making him nuts (although he was more of a dick than Ock). While I give you that it qualifies as nuance, I had already seen a similar situation in the first movie. To me he was just too sympathetic when he could have been a crazy asshole and still had depth.

For what its worth, I really enjoyed the movies when they came out, mostly because I was hype to see these characters in a big tentpole film. Thinking back on them now, they just don't hold up as well. I did watch some of SM1 on tv last night, and SM2 was probably better.

I just would have liked to have seen Raimi not make 4 of his 5 villains so empathetic.