Can not wholly agree with your comments. The show was a bit more difficult in the fact that although the contestants choose their own subjects it did leave them open to 50 million potential question masters - not a feature of Millionaire. It did in fact give the opportunity to learn about things you did not know about as well.
One interesting point to mention is that on Millionaire you have the choice of taking the money after seeing if you can answer the question or not. On The People Versus you had to answer until you got a question wrong.
As a contestant on the first series it was good to me so i am not knocking it.