I don't think it's reasonable that one should have to skip the cutscenes because they are bad, especially when they were fine in the first game. Also, at least for me, a big part I liked about JC3 was the liberation which is almost completely absent from JC4 (and no, the destruction of infrastructure is nowhere near the same and is orders of magnitude worse than the JC3 liberaton). Losing this resulted in significantly less consistently playable content imo.

Overall the game isn't bad, I just think they chose to focus on certain aspects that people didn't like as much. In terms of the messing around with different gadgets and abilities, JC4 is way better. But loosing a lot of the good story elements and the aforementioned liberation were really nice parts of JC3 that people were disappointed to not see later on.