I've felt the exact same way before. I'm glad someone beat me to le punch and added tears so that I didn't have to sift through the trash by myself. Not much more I can add, but I will be testing these theories for sure.
The topic starter is obviously mostly into platformer games... I didn't find the most commonly acclaimed gameplay-focused h-games in that list, such as Black Souls, Pronant Symphony, The Last Sovereign, Monster Girl Quest, Rance games, Meister series, the Sequel series, Ambrosia, etc. Which makes it pretty much meaningless to anyone who's looking for a complex JRPG or strategy game.
This got me hyped to make my own similar list, it is a overall good list, but of course there will be different preferences per person and I don't agree on the placings for a lot of them. Still it is a great list overall, and I feel as though it will be a good starting point for anyone looking for games that have good gameplay in general.
highly approve, i was just as sick of those "games" this post was quite helpful, I just find crazy the amount of people that think those generic VNs are the most amazing games ever, it's been quite hard finding actual good stuff in this site