This is truly the Family Guy setup right here:

"Hey look! There's (insert random celebrity/movie/pop culture reference appearing out of nowhere)"

*cue to flashback, and/or attempt at witty comment

Don't kid yourself. The Simpsons invented that routine. Family Guy just ran it into the ground. Then it doubled back on itself and now The Simpsons gets shit for using a gag structure it popularized.

Of course, they've long since forgotten how to do that sort of joke well, so maybe the grief is deserved.

While there were pop culture references in the Simpsons they were never the selling point of the show, neither the "main" jokes. They would also be more casually introduced, not just "hey, look, ain't that a famous movie/celebrity/pop star reference?" One of the many diseases that plague the show was indeed the celebrity walk of shame, the episode with Kim Bassinger and Alec Baldwin would be, i think, the starting point of the show shoving down celebrities for the sake of it.

In old simpsons style there were random observations but they related to the story in some way. In this scene it seems that they just threw in a joke that had nothing to do with the rest of the episode.

Also: They already did Ayn Rand years ago, with the Ayn Rand daycare center where Maggie was put in.

In the early days, the Simpsons did do cutaway humor, but as was stated above, it was more often about the characters, not a celeb joke or one-off gag. The writers behind that seemed to migrate to "The Critic" where it continued, but the celebrity jokes were more at home and made more sense there.

Family Guy puts stuff like that in place of anything resembling even the flimsiest sitcom plot. It's like Seth's got to get the characters from premise A to conclusion B and he gets bored with that even before the audience does.

To be fair, the Simpsons didn't reference pop culture often because of their giant production lag. They couldn't make jokes that wouldn't work in nine months, which turned out to be for the best.

Not if Fox has anything to do with it.

Demanding whole shows be taken off of YouTube? I get that. Demanding clips of favorite gags be removed? That's kind of self-defeating. All it can do is help promote the program. They did the same thing with sites that hosted Simpsons WAV files for computer event noises, too, which made even less sense.

That's how Rand liked it.