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You are operating on the premise that Dylan is not a "popular" artist. But he is, and he has been for some time. Those lyrics that seem so inscrutable to you have made people happy when he sang them and when scores of others sang them. He is not Beatles popular, but he's an artist that millions know at first or second-hand. So your canard ain't exactly flying.
Bruce is great in an entirely different, crowd-pleasing, way. There is no need to compare--unless, of course, you want to get into the Dylanesque self-invention of Springsteen's onstage self-mythologizing (all those stories about taking "the Big Man" out to the end of a desert road to find God, etc.), the Dylanesque rejection of pop godhood that Nebraska represents, the blatantly Dylanesque move of The Seeger Sessions, the Dylanesque literariness (e.g., Bruce's namedropping of Flannery O'Connor, Ron Kovic, etc.), and so on--okay, then there's something to compare.
