Problem with the Beatles is that they are generally placed by many to be in a league of their own above all other groups of their era.
Most people who hate them, hate them for this reason not because of their music.
It is difficult to find a group that produced that volume of output with a good percentage of quality work within the volume but I would say they cannot be put in a league of their own if you apply a song for song approach.
Example - Eleanor Rigby, yes it has something but I would go for Keith West's Excerpt from a teenage opera if you put them head to head.
The fact that Keith West did not have any other hits should not take anything away from what he did produce.
So just about any Beatles song can be matched by another artists work at least if not bettered.
Also, while it is widely known that towards the end the band members hardly had any input on each others work so a good chunk of the album was pure McCartney or pure Lennon, when each stepped out from under the Beatles halo they produced fairly low qulaity work (any decent Wings records?) so without the Beatles halo the work can be seen as equally low qulality.
