Aimless dystopia - where's the story?

Twice in the last few months I've read dystopian stories that left me wondering why I'd bothered, and why  those writers had spent so long with that particular narrative and set of characters.

I understand the desire to write cautionary tales.  We use the medium of story to question and challenge aspects of our current cultural and political orientation.  Or we want to question the way our political institutions are leaning, or what we perceive as dangerous tendencies in big business to ignore the needs of the planet.  But the key thing is that we challenge those things in a story.

Both the dystopias I read failed the basic tests for what makes a story.  Both had ensemble casts, with the viewpoint switching so often it was hard to tell whose story it was meant to be. One took the form of distant third person narratives that were almost omniscient narrators. Which gave me a big problem.   I wanted to find a character to root for, to care about whether they succeeded or not, but this detachment made that impossible.

Both books also didn't have a real character arc for any of the viewpoint characters.  Things were hopeless and they were wandering around at the start of the books, things were hopeless and they were still wandering around at the end of it.  Both stories were about a bunch of characters' pointless wanderings.  

This might have got across the message of the book, but it didn't tell a satisfying story.  And if I buy a novel I expect to be told a story.  Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends.  And hopefully something changes within them.  In both these dystopias the only thing that had changed by the end of the book was that some minor characters had got killed.

If I'm to be engaged with a dystopia I need to see characters with hope and vision, characters striving to better the lot of the little band of survivors.  Even characters who ram home the environmental message, determined that this disaster will never happen again.

I want to see that some characters retain their hopes and dreams.  And that they believe it's worth striving for a better life, bettering their situation.  For when human hopes and dreams are totally wiped out as in these stories, then we will be too.