I think it's a lot about personal taste. The fact that you are just wasting soooo much time on walking/runnig somewhere - even if there's a map to jump between major locations - annoys me at times. You'll always have different sublocataions and yet you may spend minutes just to get from one thing to another, even you know excatly where they are.
People at times rightly complain about the minigames in SS, but in any RPGM game devs tend to implement even more RPGM mechanics which really should not be used more than few time at best in any porn game (like a fucking crafting sytem and stuff) - and let's not even talk about movable boulders, light barriers, hidden items or so.
Last but not least, the most important part to me by now simply is the massive split in art and style. You are essentially spending 90% of your playtime looking at pretty bad 2d art, just to get a few nice assets in between.
Maybe I'm just overemphasizing this point, but to me that's one of the factors why I like good 2D VNs. The art is consistent across all parts of the game and basically every screen/background/etc. you see is appealing.
Yeah it is about personal taste. I rather play something like an NLT game or Dandy Boy (although Dandy's gameplay is farrr more aggravating and broken) than many VN's that want you to repeatedly do a Renpy scene and grind a stat to level up a skill. SS is guilty of this too and it's not always more story or a fun scene but repeatedly doing the same action until you reach some threshold in order to progress for the plot to move forward or you have to be at the right place somewhere at the right time.
I much prefer having a RPGM puzzle and walking from point a to point b to finish something. What I find objectionable though and you'd probably agree with this, is when RPGM games are incredibly cryptic and you have to follow a goddamn walkthrough to play the game. Outside of those bad games, I do find the RPG style far more satisfying than reading massive novels of dialogue with no new scenes or flat out repeating the same stuff over and over where even the erotic scenes are boring to look at. It is especially monotonous in the 3DCG VNs.
I agree that RPGM games should be simple. I generally dislike complex systems in RPGM and play on the easiest modes if there is a combat system. There are exceptions where it does not matter if the game is bare bones but I can typically enable cheats or find ways to alter stats/money in those games
edit: and because I forgot to mention this, the good thing about a lot of these RPGM games, and you'll find this with even obscure japanese ones, is that they have a lot better and more plentiful art than what western devs typically provide us which makes up for not having the uniformity of a well done VN-type game like SS
