Something I haven't really seen mentioned is that anyone can always criticize anything. No matter how much planning you do or content you have or polish you put in a release, someone will still say something negative about it. For the simple fact that not everything is for everyone. These games that people complain about are incredibly successful, and a big part of that is because of the things being criticized.
And it boils down to a bit of a lack of understanding of how games work. Both from a lot of devs and from players. For one, a game can't be too easy. If everything gets handed to the player without them feeling like they earned it, then it isn't rewarding. Being rewarded for your efforts is a big part of what makes games fun. One of the most common ways to do this, is to make the player grind. By doing the grind people are then rewarded with the thing they wanted. The anticipation and work makes the reward satisfying. You just have to balance it so that the grind is worth the reward, and if you can disguise the grind to feel like gameplay then you've really succeeded. Which is the hard part. When a game first comes out, it's going to be basically impossible to get this balance. Especially when it comes to a sandbox game. Since you either have to only put in content meant for the first bit of the game, which is all the baby mode tutorial stuff that just gets handed to the player, and that's just not particularly engaging or fun. Or you have to add in some stuff meant for later to keep the player playing for longer and to better represent the game as a whole, but that will require a lot of grinding. Again, balance is what's important, but also impossible to get right at first. Unless you want to work for a full year or two without any kind of support or any kind of feedback if anyone will even like the game or not. Since until you have something out, you'll never really know if people like the idea enough to try it or not.
Another common way that game devs make a game rewarding, is forcing a player to do something they don't want to do. I always use the MJ stealth sections in Spider-Man PS4 as an example. Everyone hates those sections, because instead of swinging around the city beating up people with superpowers, you're forced to sit and wait and sneak around super slow with no real tools to help you. But these sections serve an incredibly important purpose to the game. By forcing you into a slower section and taking away all the tools you normally have, when you get back to being Spider-Man, it's incredibly refreshing and so much fun. The player has more fun than they were before, because they had to spend time doing something they didn't like. Without those sections, by that point of the game, the gameplay would start getting dull. You'd effectively be desensitized to it. So having a section people don't like and breaks up the normal gameplay flow, makes the game more fun for longer. People pretty universally say it's bad, but those "bad" sections make the game better. The length is even well balanced. They're just long enough for people to get annoyed, but not long enough to get people annoyed enough to drop the game. Just like before, it's all about having a good balance so that the game feels rewarding enough to be worth the investment.
In the context of adult games, things like area navigation and minigames that people complain about are the same things that keep them interested in the game. Again, these games people are criticizing have a ton of supporters and make a lot of money. Whether intentional or not, they're clearly designing their games in a way that's engaging. Trying to take out things just because people say they didn't like it, isn't a good idea.
So try not to just take criticism at face value. First try to figure out if the critcism is valid or not. If it is, then maybe it's not something to include. However, if it serves a purpose and it's just the player complaining without an understanding of why it's in the game, and still continues to play the game, then it's not something you're going to want to take out. That's something you should make sure to keep in. If someone doesn't like sandbox games, and complains about a staple of sandbox games, then it's not really valid criticism either. You're making a game for people who do like sandbox games and are there for those staple systems. Don't take things out just because someone who doesn't like the genre doesn't like them.
Also keep in mind, just because a certain type of person is vocal, that doesn't always reflect the real majority. The games you listed are all very popular games that got a lot of support. If the vocal criticisms about the games being things like "dull" or "boring" were valid, then the games wouldn't have ever gotten any support. Always look to your actual audience and supporters for feedback, not rando comments on piracy sites. The people who like the project enough to support it by following you places like Patreon or Twitter or Discord or whatever you use, that's your audience. That's who you should be worried about.
And lastly, don't worry about people saying you need to have things like a lot of content in a first release. I'd honestly argue the opposite. It's far more important to have a product out as early as possible, for a couple of reasons. For one, no matter how much content is in that first release, it's still a first release. Most people avoid games until they've had consistent updates. If you work for a year or two and release a game with hours and hours of content, people will still avoid it because it's a first release. It's better to get a proof of concept out, and see how that does after a few updates. I've made the mistake of working too long on a project before releasing anything. I spent years working on a game and then it released and no one played it, no one engaged with it or followed it, and it was DOA. Even after updating it, it still got nothing. People just weren't interested in the core premise, or characters, or whatever it was that kept people from trying it. A failure like that is always a possibility. Way better to get something more like a POC out and see if people try it. What I've done with my current project is release it as more of a POC and then dedicate a certain amount of time to pushing out continual updates. Since no one really plays first releases, I'm not judging on the project's success or failure until I hit that time and number of updates.
The other reason I'd argue against waiting to put something out is because the longer you wait, the longer you go without potential support. There's no reason so spend 2 years working for free on a project that people may just not like. On top of that, if you release earlier and get a good amount of support early on, you can make a better game in the same amount of time. Since if you're getting enough support, you can do things like hire other people to help work on the game or maybe switch to dev full time. Both cases mean you get to work more and make a better overall game.
Anyway, I've probably rambled enough. Hopefully that made sense and was potentially helpful. Good luck with your game!
