Like your wife, I thought it was an absolutely brilliant film 15 years ago when I was an enlightened college kid who had just discovered LSD. I watched it again last year and could barely get through it.
The philosophical ideas presented have no consistency or connection to whatever passes for a plot, the pacing/narrative is an afterthought, and (sorry to any Linklater fans) the rotoscoping animation started to give me a migraine.
And how many are bots?