That was a well-written essay. I agree with you, as well.
I've already talked about this in a few other topics, but I'm always happy to rant about it! I'm on Team New Leaf all the way; I love that game so much! I bought it the month that it came out, and I quickly became obsessed. I played it for years. I recently picked it up again several months ago, and I've been playing practically every day since. I have a lot of happy memories of my first town... birthdays and holidays celebrated. But now it's even better because now I'm playing with my SO, which makes it even more special! We work on the town together, deciding where to put things, sharing flowers, and I even made a little version of him to live in the town with me.
While I think that it's unreasonable to not let you pick things like skin color or hair at character creation, I actually really approve of the wait times that come with things like shop upgrades, public works projects, etc. Things take time, and because of that, not only do you feel like you've really earned whatever you've managed to achieve, but it almost always makes the prospect of a new day exciting. What NPC will be in town today? Who might be in the campsite? I can't wait to see the new PWP in place! I can't wait to see what new hybrids have spawned. Who's RV will be at the campground, and what items will Harvey be selling? What will be for sale at the Nook Emporium? What new dialogue will I see from my villagers? Every day when I wake up, booting up my game is an exciting prospect... and when I go to sleep, I do so looking forward to tomorrow.
As for New Horizons... that's a totally different story. I was caught up in the hype for New Horizons, and I also bought it close to release date. As time went on, my opinion of it quickly soured, until I ended up returning it after only a few weeks of play. The heart just wasn't there for me; something just wasn't right. If I had to quickly list of a few reasons for my distaste for NH, it would be the following:
1. You touched on this a bit in your essay, but it feels to me kind of... manipulative? Like the designers knew that people were instagramming/tweeting their perfect towns in NL, and so they made the next game specifically for showing off picture perfect towns on social media. Rather than being a life sim with some design aspects and customization, it's a game based almost entirely on landscape architecture, with the intended goal seemingly being to create the best picture perfect snapshots to show off on instagram or whatever. Even the player character model is made to look even more cutesy than ever before. As somebody who doesn't particularly care for social media, this leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
2. I tried to go into the game with an open mind regarding crafting, but I just don't feel like it's a good fit for Animal Crossing. Tools breaking makes the game unfun to me. I've heard that even gold tools break, and that just seems insane to me. I can't imagine having a town filled with flowers, as my watering can was breaking while working with only a small handful. And this is also subjective, but I would always rather receive a piece of furniture as a reward for an event rather than a DIY. The crafting wouldn't be as bad if it didn't almost completely supplant store-bought items, but that isn't the case as...
3. They decided to cut lots and lots of furniture that made for so many diverse and interesting indoor designs. And what baffles me is that it wasn't even necessary. Why not let you craft rococo furniture with 'fancy' wood or something like that? It feels like a lot of the old furniture that could have easily been made craftable was just sacrificed for no reason other than to force 'new' furniture on the player to accommodate for a crafting mechanic that nobody asked for... at least, I never asked for it. For the short time of my playing, I spent every day eagerly going to Nook's and finding the same handful of furniture (none of which were stuff I wanted for my house)... and finding DIYs for boring, samey wooden furniture that looked pretty bleh. I already had three rooms in my house, and I had almost nothing to furnish them with. In comparison, in NL, I have so many items I'd love to use in a room, and not enough rooms! But even if they went ahead and added all my favorite old furniture sets and pieces from NL, it still wouldn't matter because...
4. The villagers are lobotomized shells of their former selves. I've mentioned this in another topic, but I couldn't believe how much they butchered the lazy personality. Beau was my first lazy move-in, and the lazy dialogue left such a bad taste in my mouth that I actually sort of dislike Beau as a character, now. This ties in with #1 from above, but whenever I see pictures of NH that include villagers, I can't see them as anything other than photo-op set-pieces. The designers heard all the people from NL who didn't ever talk to their villagers or do tasks for them at the risk of 'ruining' them, so decided that people only really cared about their villagers as cute-looking set pieces. A lot of their houses got wrecked in the transition from NL to NH as well, due to the lack of furniture and other bizarre design decisions (some villagers homes were designed as though they were real-life animals, others were randomly given completely baffling non-homes like trash dumps and parking lots to live in out of nowhere...)
5. Drip-feeding updates little by little is a practice that I greatly dislike and seems even more manipulative. NL was a finished game at the start, and the Welcome Amiibo update was the icing on the already gorgeous cake.
6. There were little things I just didn't like about the game. Flowers look more washed-out rather than the candy-bright, beautiful flowers in NL. I hated that you couldn't just pick up a flower without leaving stems behind. I was baffled that in an island game, they left out Kapp'n. I was shocked that perfect fruit was removed, for apparently no reason. I could not stand the awful tutorial music. The randomly generated islands almost always having the exact same flora and fauna as my own island made island hopping get old real fast for me. I didn't like the way the villagers were textured; they look like plush animals, to me. I missed stationary and the pelican trio. I didn’t like the cell phone, or nook miles.
So, at the end of the day, the little QOL improvements that NH brought to the table just weren't enough. I would be lying if I said that I had no interest at all in terraforming (which I never got to)... but at the end of the day, what was the point if I couldn't enjoy day-to-day life with my favorite villagers anymore?
Thank you for reading this rant, if you made it this far.
The one thing I wish NL had included was the ability to customize your skin tone but even without it, I still very much love the game. 
