Actually you may have missed a point or two. The dialogue is supposed to be banal. The human characters are supposed to be less likeable, and somehow less human than HAL is. The Discovery is supposed to be colorless, sterile, and impersonal (read as boring by some viewers).

Part of the central permise (and it's clearer in the book than it is in the movie) is that the apes in the opening scene were dying out. They had gone as far as they could with what evolution had given them, and had to be kick-started by the monolith before they could make the jump to actual tool-use and further evolution. They were starving to death among all the pigs they could eat because they couldn't grasp the idea of eating them and how to go about it. If the monolith hadn't shown up the apes would have all died out rather than evolved into humans.

By 2001 the human race is again as far as they can go on their own. The banality of Floyd, Poole, and Bowman's relationships and their colorless world are illustrations of this. The drive of earlier ages has been lost for a sort of placid mediocrity. The human race is on the verge of destroying itself with its tools, and is unable to make the jump to the next stage by itself. Humanity has to have another kick-start in order to survive, and the monolith again supplies this.
Dave Bowman at the end of the movie successfully moves to the next stage, and in a way that must be largely incomprehensible to us, because if it weren't then we could do it without the assistance of the people of the monolith. The star child is as much a mystery to us as the tool-using ape is to his opponents at the water hole.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky