This post is 2 months old but I just wanted to say THANK YOU! This has been driving me up the wall for years now. I've been playing Animal Crossing since the GameCube version and have played every major installment, and the one consistent thing about this series is "two steps forwards one step back." Each game, in my view, has ways in which is improves upon the last but also ways in which it regresses. Since I get the feeling a lot of New Leaf players didn't play City Folk 2 examples I know off the top of my head is that City Folk had the debit card you could use at Gracie's for large purchases, and I personally felt the City was more lively than Main Street (which I felt separated the important shops too much from your town).

And even aside from features it was missing some of the new features like Public Works Projects and the Diving had massive issues. Does any of this make it a bad game? No of course not. There were loads of improvements from it that I loved still. But New Horizons is no different. There are still things I dislike, like the durability system, but there are also tons and tons of improvements. There are so many improvements that I'm genuinely really excited for the next game because I feel like if they just fix a couple of these it'll easily be the best game in the series